Vilna

In the geography of Mary Antin's childhood, Vilna occupied a strange middle ground. When she was a little girl, the world was divided into two parts: Polotzk, the place where she lived, and a strange land called Russia, where one's father went on business and where so many bad things happened that mothers and grandmothers cried at the railroad station. But after a while there came to her knowledge another division, a region intermediate between Polotzk and Russia. There seemed to be a place called Vitebsk, and one called Vilna, and Riga, and some others. From those places came photographs of uncles and cousins one had never seen, and letters, and sometimes the uncles themselves. These uncles were just like people in Polotzk; the people in Russia, one understood, were very different. In answer to one's questions, the visiting uncles said all sorts of silly things, to make everybody laugh; and so one never found out why Vitebsk and Vilna, since they were not Polotzk, were not as sad as Russia. Mother hardly cried at all when the uncles went away. Vilna thus entered the child's mental map as a place of kinship and laughter, distinct from the sorrowful associations of Russia proper, yet not home.

A Farewell Stop on the Road to America

Vilna's most significant appearance in the memoir comes during the family's great emigration. The route lay over the German border, with Hamburg for the port. On the way to the frontier the family stopped for a farewell visit in Vilna, where Mary's mother had a brother. The visit is recorded with striking brevity in the contemporaneous letter Mary wrote to her uncle during her first months in America, a detailed account of the adventures between Polotzk and Boston. Vilna is slighted in the description; Mary finds special mention of only two things, the horse-cars and the bookstores. This spareness is itself telling: a city of family connection is reduced to its modern conveyances and its shops of printed words, foreshadowing the intellectual hunger that would define the narrator's American life. The visit was a pause between worlds, a last touch of the old country's kinship before the frontier crossing.

The City as a Marker of the Pale's Inner Divisions

The intermediate status of Vilna in the child's geography reflects a deeper structure in the memoir's understanding of the Pale of Settlement. Within the wall raised around Mary's birthplace by the vigilance of the police, there was another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable—the wall of Jewish religious integrity, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale in defiance of their jailers, built of the ruins of their pillaged homes and cemented with the blood of their murdered children. Harassed on every side, the Russian Jew fell back upon hereditary faith in God, finding in the study of the Torah the balm for all wounds. Vilna, as a city of the Pale, belonged to this world of inner fortification, yet its very existence as a place of visiting uncles and bookstores hinted at a spectrum of experience within the confinement—places that were not Polotzk but were not the terrifying Russia either. The child's inability to understand why Vitebsk and Vilna were not as sad as Russia marks the beginning of her perception that the Pale was not monolithic, that even within the walled world there were gradations of distance and danger.

A Place of Transit, Not of Settlement

Vilna never becomes a setting for sustained action in the memoir; it remains a place passed through, a name on the route. The family's actual journey began on a gray wet morning in early April when they set out for the frontier, with bags and bundles more bulky than valuable, a trifling sum of money, the steamer ticket, and the foreign passport as the magic agents by which they hoped to span the five thousand miles of earth and water between them and the father. The passport was supposed to pass them over the frontier without trouble, but because of the prevalence of cholera in some parts of the country, the poorer sort of travellers, such as emigrants, were subjected to more than ordinary supervision. Vilna, as the farewell stop, belongs to this liminal phase—the last city of the old world where family ties could still be touched, before the machinery of emigration, with its passports and quarantines, took over. The horse-cars and bookstores that Mary records are the emblems of a modernity that was already reaching into the Pale, preparing its inhabitants for the American world of streetcars and public libraries that awaited them.

The City's Place in the Narrative of Transformation

The slightness of Vilna's treatment in the letter is itself a measure of the transformation the narrator underwent. Mary Antin began life, as she puts it, in the Middle Ages, and found herself a contemporary of the twentieth century, thrilling with its latest thought. The double voyage of discovery she undertook—constantly referring her new world to the old for comparison, and the old to the new for elucidation—made her a student and philosopher by force of circumstances. Vilna, with its bookstores, was one of the first places where the old world showed signs of the new, where the printed word was already a commodity displayed for purchase. The city thus stands at the threshold of the memoir's central movement: the passage from a world of religious fortification and hereditary faith to a world of public libraries, free schools, and individual inquiry. In the geography of the book, Vilna is the last outpost of the familiar before the unknown, a place where kinship and books briefly coincide, and where the child's expanding sense of the world first encountered the promise of something beyond the walls of Polotzk.