Tefillin

Tefillin, known in English as phylacteries, are two small leathern boxes containing parchments inscribed with certain passages of Scripture, worn during morning prayer, one on the head and one on the arm. In the world of Mary Antin's memoir, these ritual objects stand as the most intimate and demanding of Jewish devotional practices, binding the worshipper's mind and limb to the words of the Torah at the start of each day. Their presence in the narrative is brief but decisive: they appear at the moment of departure from the Old World as a mark of respectability, and they disappear in the New World as a sign of religious transformation.

The Tefillin as a Marker of Respectability in the Old World

The most detailed appearance of tefillin in the memoir comes not from Mary's own practice but from the anxious testimony of Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, who rehearses for Mary's mother a long message for her emigrated relative in America. Hayye Dvoshe describes the man as having left for America eighteen months earlier "fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new,—made it only three years before,—everything respectable, there could be nothing better." The inventory is telling: the new phylacteries are listed alongside the silk skull-cap and the nearly new suit as part of a complete outfit of respectability. For the wig-maker, a man's religious equipment is as much a part of his honorable presentation as his clothing and his cash. The tefillin here are not merely devotional objects but social credentials, evidence that the emigrant left the old country as a proper, observant Jew, equipped to maintain his identity abroad.

The same passage reveals the fragility of that equipment. Hayye Dvoshe's relative sent one letter describing his arrival at Castle Garden, his reception by his uncle's son-in-law, his conduct to the baths, and the purchase of an American suit—and then fell silent. "Since then not a postal card, not a word, just as if he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him." The new phylacteries, the silk skull-cap, and the respectable suit all prove powerless to keep the man in contact with his family. The very completeness of his religious outfitting makes his disappearance more bewildering: a man so properly equipped should not have vanished into the American void. The wig-maker's lament—"Lost, as if in the sea!"—hangs over the emigrant's fate, and the tefillin, so carefully packed, become an ironic emblem of the traditions that may not survive the crossing.

The Father's Abandonment of the Tefillin

The second appearance of tefillin is negative: their absence. When Mary and her family join her father in America, she observes that "he did not wear the sacred fringes, and did not put on the phylacteries and pray." The detail is recorded without surprise or shock, because Mary has already been prepared by an earlier memory—the Sabbath night when her father "had with his own hand turned out the lamp." The father's abandonment of the phylacteries is the culmination of a process of religious loosening that began in the old country and completed itself in the new. For Mary, the missing tefillin are not a loss but a liberation. She reflects that when she saw her father go out to work on the Sabbath exactly as on a week day, she understood why God had not annihilated her with lightnings when she had purposely carried something in her pocket on the Sabbath: "there was no God, and there was no sin." The father's failure to put on the phylacteries is thus the visible proof that the entire system of prohibitions and obligations has collapsed. The sacred objects, once the daily companion of a pious man, have become relics of a discarded world.

The Tefillin and the Logic of Religious Decline

Mary's own religious history mirrors the fate of the tefillin. She describes herself as "always weak in my faith, playing at sanctity as I played at soldiers," and admits that she had neglected her books of devotion and given herself up to profane literature at the first opportunity in Vitebsk, never taking up her prayer book again. The phylacteries, which a devout man would have worn daily, belong to the same order of practice as the prayer book and the sacred fringes—all abandoned in the American atmosphere. Yet Mary adds a crucial qualification: "if the golden truth of Judaism had not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have been so ready to put away my religion." The tefillin, in this reading, are part of the "motley rags of formalism"—the external apparatus of observance that obscured rather than conveyed the spiritual core. The very concreteness of the leather boxes and parchment scrolls, their daily repetition, their mechanical binding of body to text, made them easy to discard once the formal system lost its authority. The phylacteries thus become the emblem of a religion experienced as outward form rather than inward conviction, and their abandonment is not a tragedy but a release from a formalism that had never taken root.

The trajectory of the tefillin in the memoir—from the wig-maker's proud inventory of a respectable emigrant's equipment, to the father's silent neglect, to Mary's retrospective understanding—traces the arc of Americanization itself. The objects that once guaranteed a man's standing in the Jewish community of Polotzk lose their meaning in the streets of Boston, where the father works on the Sabbath and the daughter declares herself a Freethinker. The tefillin, so carefully packed for the journey, do not survive the crossing in any form that matters. What remains is the memory of their absence, and the freedom that absence made possible.