Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, stands at the solemn heart of the Jewish year as Mary Antin remembers it in her memoir of childhood in Polotzk and rebirth in America. In the pious household of her youth, the festival was observed with all due pomp and circumstance, and its power was such that it moved even the laughing children to a longing for consecration. The year in that house, she writes, was an endless song in many cantos of joy, lamentation, aspiration, and rhapsody, and Yom Kippur was its most searching and inward movement. Yet the day also becomes, across the arc of the memoir, a precise instrument for measuring the family's slow, uneven Americanization: the child's literal-minded bargaining with God, the father's headlong campaign to purge the house of superstition, and the mother's instinctive retention of the day's spiritual kernel even as she drops its outward forms. No other observance in the book carries so much weight of both inherited piety and transformed identity.

The Festival in the Pious Year

In the Antin home the festivals were kept with full solemnity, and Yom Kippur held a place of unique gravity within that cycle. Passover was beautiful with shining new things all through the house, Purim was gay with feasting and presents and the jolly mummers, Succoth was a poem lived in a green arbor, and New-Year thrilled the heart with its symbols and promises. But the Day of Atonement was different in kind: it moved even the laughing children to a longing for consecration, a spiritual seriousness that the other holidays, for all their beauty, did not evoke. The day belonged to the somber register of the year, the canto of lamentation and aspiration, and it demanded of even the youngest a turn inward that the feasts of joy did not. This was the festival as it lived in the rhythm of a household where the whole year was experienced as a sacred song, and where the child absorbed the day's meaning not through doctrine but through the atmosphere of the house itself.

The Child's Bargain with the Almighty

The child's understanding of Yom Kippur was characteristically literal and transactional. On Atonement Eve, Mary would swing the sacrifice around her head, repeating the formula, and she certainly believed that she was bargaining with the Almighty for pardon, and that He was interested in the matter. The sacrifice was a rooster, to be killed, roasted, and garnished for the devotee's own table at the breaking of the fast, and even a lean rooster seemed a more respectable offering than a mere groschen to increase the charity fund. But the next day, when the fast was over and she enjoyed all of her chicken that she could eat, she believed as certainly that God could not be party to such a foolish transaction, in which He got nothing but words, while she got both the feast and the pardon. The sacrifice of money, to be spent for the poor, seemed to her a more reliable insurance against damnation. The well-to-do pious offered up both living sacrifice and money for the poor-box, but it was a sign of poverty to offer only money. All this was so illogical that it unsettled her faith in minor points of doctrine, and on these points she was quite happy to believe one thing today and another tomorrow. The festival thus became, in her memory, the occasion of her first sustained religious questioning, a day whose solemnity could not survive contact with her own sharp childish logic.

The Mother's Retention of the Kernel

The fate of Yom Kippur in the family's American years is told most fully through the mother. When the father undertook to purge his house of superstition, the process of the mother's emancipation was not obvious to the child at the time, but what she observed of her mother's outward conduct has been interpreted by her subsequent experience. Today the mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile neighbors all the year round, but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement, calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to the God of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs must join in the ancient service. The mother has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism, but years were required for this process of instinctive selection. The father, in his ambition to make Americans of the family, was rather headlong and strenuous in his methods, and on the eve of departure for the New World he wrote boldly to the mother that progressive Jews in America did not spend their days in praying, urging her to leave her wig in Polotzk as a first step of progress. The mother, like the majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on authority, and she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she took his hint and set out upon her journey in her own hair, though not without reluctance, for the Jewish faith in her was deeply rooted. The law of the Fathers was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable from the spirit. Yet the breath of revolt against orthodox externals was at this time beginning to reach Polotzk from the greater world, notably from America, and the mother's own nephew went no farther than Vilna, ten hours' journey from Polotzk, to learn to cut his beard. Yom Kippur, in this account, becomes the one day on which the mother's old self reasserts itself, the annual return of a piety that the rest of the year has set aside.

The Day as Measure of Change

Yom Kippur also functions in the memoir as a quiet standard against which the family's transformation can be measured. The father's own journey had begun with a rejection of the rigid scheme of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale, which offered no opening to any other mode of life, and his travels had been the making of him, turning him into a dissenter who hardly knew what he wanted to embrace in place of the ideals he rejected. In America, his first act on landing had been his application for naturalization, and the boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. The Day of Atonement, with its call to draw nearer to the God of the fathers, was precisely the kind of observance that the father's new creed could not accommodate, and the mother's continued need to join in the ancient service marks the limit of his headlong project. The child, meanwhile, had already begun to question the day's logic in Polotzk, and her later declaration of freethought in the schoolyard, where she held her ground against a circle of mocking classmates by reminding them that this was a free country and that George Washington would not have treated her as they were doing, carries forward the same spirit of questioning that Yom Kippur first awakened. The festival thus binds together the three generations of the family's religious life: the child's literal bargaining, the father's rejection, and the mother's instinctive retention of the kernel.

The Festival and the Texture of Memory

The Day of Atonement belongs, in the memoir's structure, to the same remembered world as the Sabbath walks and the Polotzk cheese cakes, and its power is inseparable from that world's physical texture. The child's memory of the festival is bound up with the taste of the chicken eaten at the breaking of the fast, just as her memory of Sabbath evenings is bound up with the thick cheese cakes that she can dream away a half-hour on, and just as her memory of a cherry season in Polotzk is bound up with a cherry-stone contest with a boy set to watch a store. The flavor of those remembered foods, she insists, cannot be reproduced by any American cook, for it takes history to make such a cake, and the same might be said of the festival itself: its meaning cannot be carried whole into the new world, any more than the old species of cherry can be bought at an American market stall. The mother's annual return to the ancient service on the Day of Atonement is thus the one flavor that survives the crossing, the one observance that the new world cannot dissolve. It is the kernel that remains when the husk has been dropped, and its persistence is the memoir's quietest and most moving testimony to what the family carried with them out of the Pale.