Zaddik

In the world of the Pale of Settlement that Mary Antin reconstructs in her memoir, the zaddik was the supreme human type, a man whose simple piety unsupported by learning could raise him above every social barrier. The term designated a man of piety, and its power lay not in scholarship or wealth but in the quality of a holy life. The narrator's great-grandfather, Israel Kimanyer, was the living proof of this ideal. Known throughout a good part of the Pale by the name of the village where he lived, he was poor to the verge of beggary, yet his fame as a zaddik redeemed the whole wretched clan of country peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells to which he belonged. His holiness was so renowned that people were proud to establish even the most distant relationship with him, and when his grandson, the narrator's father, came to marry, he boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer and picked his bride from the best families.

The Piety of Israel Kimanyer

The substance of Israel Kimanyer's holiness was a life of total devotion. He prayed more than other people, never failed in the slightest observance enjoined on Jews, shared his last crust with every chance beggar, and sat up nights to commune with God. His piety was of the kind that the Hasidim, the sect of enthusiasts who set religious exaltation above rabbinical lore, held in highest esteem. Among them, ecstasy in prayer and fantastic merriment on days of religious rejoicing raised a man to a hero among his kind, and Israel embodied this ideal of fervent, unlettered faith. He knew of Hebrew only enough to teach beginners, yet this minimal learning did not diminish his standing; simple piety unsupported by learning had a parallel value in the eyes of good families, and in his case it made him a figure of legend.

The devotion he inspired was so great that the pious Jews of Kimanye and the neighboring villages built him a house with their own hands, close on a century before the narrator wrote. He was too poor to build his own house, so the good people who loved him, and who were almost as poor as he, collected a few rubles among themselves, bought a site, and carried the beams and boards on their shoulders, singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the presentation of a scroll to the synagogue. They hauled and sawed and hammered till the last nail was driven home, and when they conducted the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the crowning of a czar. That little cabin, the narrator reflects, was fit to be preserved as the monument to a species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale.

The Religion Behind the Mask

The zaddik ideal reveals what the narrator takes to be the ultimate source of the pious enthusiasm that built her great-grandfather's house. Stripped of its grotesque mask of forms, rites, and medieval superstitions, the religion of these fanatics was simply the belief that God was, had been, and ever would be, and that they, the children of Jacob, were His chosen messengers to carry His Law to all the nations. Beneath the mountainous volumes of the Talmudists and commentators, the Mosaic tablets remained intact, and out of the mazes of the Cabala the pure doctrine of ancient Judaism found its way to the hearts of the faithful. Sects and schools might rise and fall, deafening the ears of the simple with the clamor of their disputes, but the zaddik stood as the living proof that the essence of the faith survived all its encrustations. The fame of Israel Kimanyer's good life was thus not merely a personal achievement but a demonstration of what the narrator calls the substance behind the show of the Judaism of the Pale.

The Zaddik and the World of the Pale

The zaddik ideal operated within a world defined by harsh legal and social constraints. The Jews of Polotzk and the other towns of the Pale of Settlement were confined by the Czar's command to a designated area, forbidden to be found outside it because they were Jews. Within this fence, the world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and the knowledge of being a prisoner trickled into the narrator's consciousness drop by drop until the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The zaddik's holiness was a form of resistance to this degradation, a way of asserting spiritual worth in a system that denied the Jews every earthly dignity. The same system that produced the zaddik also produced the dread of military service, which forced Jewish men to violate their laws, eat trefah, work on Sabbath, and return home beggars stripped of their uniforms. It produced the bewildering array of taxes on houses, rents, business, and profits, and the excise duties on tobacco that made contraband dealing a constant risk. In this world of helplessness, where the people shrugged and said, "What can one do? One must live," the zaddik's pure devotion was the one form of power that the Czar could not confiscate.

The zaddik ideal also shaped the domestic order of the Pale. Marriage was a sacrament, and to rear a family of children was to serve God, for every Jewish man and woman had a part in the fulfilment of the ancient promise given to Jacob that his seed should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood was the great career, and while men might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood. A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, while her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. The zaddik's fame, like the scholarship of a learned boy, could elevate a family in the marriage market, and the narrator's father exploited his descent from Israel Kimanyer to pick his bride from the best families. The ideal thus permeated the most intimate arrangements of life, connecting the highest spiritual aspiration to the practical business of matching sons and daughters.

The Zaddik Ideal in America

The emigration to America transformed the meaning of the zaddik ideal. The narrator's father, who had boasted his descent from Israel Kimanyer, became a citizen of the United States at the earliest moment allowed by the law, 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 hunger for untasted manhood that drove him was a hunger for a new kind of self-assertion, one that replaced the zaddik's holy life with the citizen's free life. The narrator herself, when challenged in the schoolyard for her father's atheistic doctrines, defended her right to have any kind of God she chose by appealing to the Constitution of the United States, reminding her tormentors that this was a free country. The old ideal of piety gave way to a new ideal of liberty, and the narrator's own trajectory from the slums of Dover Street to the satin drawing-rooms of the Back Bay, and finally to Barnard College, was a journey away from the world that had produced the zaddik.

Yet the zaddik ideal left its trace on the American experience. The same moral seriousness that had made Israel Kimanyer share his last crust with every chance beggar reappeared in the narrator's father's determination to teach a bullying colored boy a lesson by having him arrested and brought to court, so that the rascal emerged from his brief imprisonment with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. The narrator's fascination with the courtroom scene, where nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, and nobody lied who didn't want to, was a fascination with a new kind of holiness, one based on the equality of all before the law rather than on the devotion of a single holy man. The zaddik's fame had redeemed a wretched clan; the American Constitution promised to redeem an entire people. The old ideal was not so much abandoned as translated into a new key, and the narrator's own success, her ability to think in English without an accent and to take all the honors she deserved at Barnard College, was the American fulfillment of the promise that a person's worth need not be determined by birth. The zaddik had been the highest expression of the Old World's spiritual aristocracy; the citizen, the narrator suggests, was the New World's answer to that ideal, a form of distinction open to all who would claim it.