Barnard College

Barnard College is the New York institution where Mary Antin completed her higher education, the final and most prestigious station in the educational pilgrimage that carried her from the Pale of Settlement to the heights of American intellectual life. Though she had long imagined herself attending Radcliffe College, an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse redirected her to Barnard instead. There she took all the honors that she deserved, and if she did not learn to write poetry, as she once supposed she should, she learned at least to think in English without an accent. The college thus stands as the institutional capstone of the American promise that had first opened before her on a bright September morning when she entered the public school, a day she said she must always remember even if she lived to be so old that she could not tell her name.

The Road to College

Barnard College was the destination toward which the entire American educational system had been pointing Mary Antin since her first day at school. That day, she later wrote, was the apex of her civic pride and personal contentment, its importance a hundred times magnified by the years she had waited, the road she had come, and the conscious ambitions she entertained. Her father, Joseph Antin, had failed in his primary quest to establish himself through his own learning, finding that his precious scholarship was of no avail in America because he had only the most antiquated methods of communicating it. But he had a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to the higher life: he could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college! His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning.

This vision of college as the ultimate reward of education took concrete form in Mary's mind when she was promoted to the grammar school about the middle of her first year. Then it was that she walked on air, for she said to herself that she was a student now, in earnest, not merely a school-girl learning to spell and cipher. She was going to learn out-of-the-way things, things that had nothing to do with ordinary life—things to know. When she walked home afternoons with the great big geography book under her arm, it seemed to her that the earth was conscious of her step. Sometimes she carried home half the books in her desk, not because she should need them, but because she loved to hold them, and also because she loved to be seen carrying books. It was a badge of scholarship, and she was proud of it. She remembered the days in Vitebsk when she used to watch her cousin Hirshel start for school in the morning, every thread of his student's uniform, every worn copybook in his satchel, glorified in her envious eyes. And now she was herself as he: aye, greater than he; for she knew English, and she could write poetry.

The Community That Made It Possible

Mary's path to Barnard was not walked alone; it was paved by a whole community of immigrants who shared her father's conviction that education was the highest good. Mr. Rosenblum, the poor grocer on Harrison Avenue, gave her the oil she needed for her lamp, and if he had had postage stamps in stock, he would have given her all she needed, and felt proud to think that he was assisting in her important correspondences. He was a poor man, with a large family, and many customers who paid as irregularly as her own family did. He ran the risk of ruin, but he did not scold—not them, at any rate. For he understood. He was himself an immigrant Jew of the type that values education, and sets a great price on the higher development of the child. He would have done in her father's place just what her father was doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in debt—anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was, but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry. To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre present for the sake of the opulent future. If there was but one child in a family of twelve who promised to achieve an intellectual career, the other eleven, and father, and mother, and neighbors must devote themselves to that one child's welfare, and feed and clothe and cheer it on, and be rewarded in the end by hearing its name mentioned with the names of the great. So the poor grocer helped to keep her in school for she did not know how many years, and this, she noted, is one of the things that is done on Harrison Avenue, by the people who pitch rubbish through their windows.

The same communal investment surrounded her at every stage. Her father did his best to make her vain and silly, boasting of her progress at school and of her exalted friends, the teachers, for a school-teacher was no ordinary mortal in his eyes; she was a superior being, set above the common run of men by her erudition and devotion to higher things. The teachers themselves responded to this faith. Miss Dillingham, her first American friend, presented her with a volume of Longfellow's poems, a thin volume of selections that was to her a bottomless treasure, the first book she had ever owned, and the start of her library. Miss Dwight preserved for years the only copy of the Washington's Birthday poem that Mary had thrown into the wastebasket, loaning it back to her so she could see what she had striven to express when she laboriously hitched together those dozen and more ungraceful stanzas.

The Public Institutions of Learning

The public institutions of Boston formed the intermediate steps between the grammar school and Barnard. The Boston Public Library was her palace, hers because she was a citizen, hers though she was born an alien, hers though she lived on Dover Street. She loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out, and to remind herself that she was there, that she had a right to be there, that she was at home there. All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—she and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours. She visited every part of the building that was open to the public, spending rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures, repeating to herself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail, and standing mute before the Prophets in the gallery above while echoes of the Hebrew Psalms she had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of her consciousness.

The Final Step

From the Latin School on, Mary wrote, she lived very much as her American schoolmates lived, having overcome her foreign idiosyncrasies, and the rest of her outward adventures might be read in any volume of American feminine statistics. But she was willing to add a few details. She went to college, as she proposed, though not to Radcliffe. Receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse, she went to Barnard College instead. There she took all the honors that she deserved; and if she did not learn to write poetry, as she once supposed she should, she learned at least to think in English without an accent. The choice of Barnard over Radcliffe was thus not a rejection of her earlier ambition but a practical accommodation, an acceptance of an opportunity that presented itself and that she did not like to refuse. The college completed the transformation that had begun with her first self-birth on the green bank of the Polota, when Life Universal had suddenly burst upon her and she had felt her little hand on the Great Pulse. It was the institutional confirmation of the spiritual birth she had undergone by bits, the body first and the spirit later, through the long and exceedingly painful growth of the spirit in those who are attentive to their own inner life.

Significance

Barnard College stands in the narrative as the proof that the American promise was not a delusion. The same system that had admitted her, a greenhorn immigrant child, to the Chelsea public school on equal terms with native citizens, that had promoted her to the grammar school where she walked on air, that had opened to her the palace of the Boston Public Library, that had carried her through the Latin School—that same system delivered her at last to a college where she could take all the honors she deserved. The community that had invested in her—the poor grocer who gave her oil, the teachers who gave her books and preserved her poems, the father who walked by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning—saw its investment realized. And Mary herself, looking back from the vantage of Barnard, could answer the question of whether she got rich by replying that she had earned enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears, and satisfy all her wants. Her favorite abode, she added, was a tent in the wilderness, where she would be happy to serve a cup of tea out of a tin kettle. The college graduate had not lost the immigrant's wonder at the world, nor the child's delight in simple things; she had only added to them the ability to think in English without an accent.