Castle Garden stands at the center of Mary Antin's account of emigration as the great gateway through which the Old World passed into the New. In the world of Polotzk, it was a name spoken with awe and anxiety—the place where the immigrant's fate was decided, where the authorities might seize a traveler's money, where a man could vanish as if swallowed by the earth. For the Antin family, it was the first landmark of America, the threshold across which they would step from the cramped certainties of the Pale of Settlement into the open possibilities of their new country. The memoir returns to it again and again, not as a mere geographical point but as a symbol of the entire transformation that emigration promised and demanded.

The Fears of Polotzk

Long before the Antins ever saw Castle Garden, it haunted the imagination of their neighbors in Polotzk as a place of both deliverance and danger. When the news spread that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America, the stream of visitors who poured into the house brought with them a cascade of warnings about the landing depot. The advice was urgent and specific: mother must not carry her money in a pocketbook but must sew it into the lining of her jacket, for the policemen in Castle Garden take all their money from the passengers as they land, unless the travellers deny having any. This image of the depot as a place where the immigrant's hard-won savings could be stripped away at the moment of arrival colored the family's expectations with a shadow of fear. The warnings were part of a larger fabric of anxiety that included fears about kosher food on the ship and the scarcity of featherbeds in America, but Castle Garden held a special place in this geography of worry—it was the point of no return, the place where the traveler's fate was sealed.

The depot also figured in the sorrowful stories of those who had gone before. Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, rehearsed for the eleventh time the tale of her vanished Möshele, who had emigrated to 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. He had written one letter describing how he arrived in Castle Garden, how well he was received by his uncle's son-in-law, how he was conducted to the baths, how they bought him an American suit—and then nothing, not a postal card, not a word, as if the earth had swallowed him. In this telling, Castle Garden was the last place from which Möshele had been heard, the point where the thread of his story broke. Hayye Dvoshe's plea to Hannah Hayye—to go into the newspaper and ask what had become of her son, to tell them that he had a silk handkerchief with his monogram in Russian that his betrothed had embroidered before the engagement was broken—carried the depot's double meaning: it was the gateway to a new life, but also the place where a man could disappear into the vastness of America and be lost forever.

The Threshold of America

The Antins' own passage through Castle Garden, though not described in the surviving evidence with the same detail as the preparations that preceded it, was the culmination of the journey that began with the arrival of the steamer ticket. The day the ticket came, the household was thrown into celebration: Mary's mother did not go out with her basket, her brother stayed out of heder, and her sister salted the soup three times. The weeks that followed were brimful of events, and the whole city of Polotzk seemed to pour into their street to bid them farewell. The departure was framed by the family's larger story of emigration, which had begun years earlier when the father, Pinchus, was carried away by the westward movement, travelling with borrowed money to a German port, whence he was forwarded to Boston at the expense of an emigrant aid society. The family's own journey, undertaken when Mary was about thirteen, followed the path he had blazed, and Castle Garden was the first American soil on which they would set foot.

The landing at Castle Garden marked the transition from the Old World to the New, the moment when the family ceased to be travelers and became immigrants. It was here that the fears rehearsed in Polotzk—the policemen, the confiscated money, the vanished sons—met the reality of American arrival. The depot was the place where the immigrant's identity was registered and processed, where the foreigner began the transformation into the citizen. For the Antin children, the passage through Castle Garden was the beginning of their Americanization, the first step on the new soil that would lead them to the tenements of the West End and, eventually, to the public library that Mary would come to call her palace.

The Symbol of Transformation

The significance of Castle Garden in the memoir extends beyond the family's own experience to become a symbol of the immigrant's journey as a whole. The depot was the point where the Old World's fears and the New World's promises converged, where the warnings of Polotzk's neighbors met the reality of American welcome. The contrast between the two—the imagined Castle Garden of the anxious imagination, where policemen stole money and men vanished, and the actual Castle Garden, where the family was received and conducted to the baths and fitted with American suits—mirrors the larger contrast between the cramped, fearful world of the Pale and the open, hopeful world of America. The memoir's treatment of the depot thus participates in its central theme: the transformation of the immigrant from a frightened alien into a confident citizen, the making over of the self that Mary describes as the essence of her American experience.

Castle Garden also serves as a link between the transnational world of the emigrants and the new world they entered. The depot was the place where the messages and inquiries of those left behind—like Hayye Dvoshe's plea to find her vanished son—were meant to be delivered, where the fates of those who had gone before could be traced. It was the point of connection between Polotzk and America, the place where the Old World's anxieties were transmitted to the New and where the New World's possibilities were first encountered. In this sense, Castle Garden is not merely a location in the memoir but a threshold between two worlds, a symbol of the journey that transformed the Antin family and, through them, the meaning of America itself.