Deborah

Deborah, called Grandma Deborah by her granddaughter Mary Antin, is a spectral but foundational presence in The Promised Land. She died when Mary was very little, so her portrait is drawn entirely from hearsay, yet she occupies a crucial place in the family chronicle as the wife of Raphael, called the Russian, and the mother of Hannah Hayye, Mary's own mother. Her story, as reconstructed by Mary, is one of a child bride whose life was shaped by the marriage customs of the Pale of Settlement, and whose memory serves as a touchstone for the Old World that the family left behind.

Identity and Background

Deborah was the daughter of one Solomon, a dealer in grain and cattle, and she was betrothed at an early age to Raphael, who had been left an orphan and was brought up by an elder brother in a village not far from Polotzk. The betrothal was arranged by Raphael's dutiful brother, who sent him to heder and secured the match. Deborah was not yet in her teens at the time of the betrothal, and she was so foolish, as the family story goes, that she was afraid of her affianced husband. The fear was so acute that one day, when she was coming from the store with a bottle of liquid yeast, she suddenly came face to face with her betrothed, which gave her such a fright that she dropped the bottle, spilling the yeast on her pretty dress, and ran home crying all the way. At thirteen she was married, which, Mary notes dryly, had a good effect on her deportment, for no more is heard of her running away from her husband.

Life and Marriage

The marriage of Deborah and Raphael was a conventional arrangement of the time, and it placed Deborah within a family of notable character. Among the interesting things belonging to her at the time of the marriage, besides her dowry, was her family. Her father was so original that he kept a tutor for his daughters, since he had no sons, and allowed them to be instructed in the rudiments of three or four languages and the elements of arithmetic. Even more unconventional was her sister Hode, who married a fiddler and travelled constantly with him through "far Russia," a life that scandalized convention but which afforded Raphael his opening for a career. For several years Raphael travelled in Hode's train, in the capacity of a shohat providing kosher meat for the little troupe in the unholy wilds of "far Russia," and the grateful couple rewarded him so generously that he soon had a fortune of eighty rubles laid by. This fortune, built on the unconventional travels of Deborah's sister, was the fruit that made Mary's own childhood so pleasant.

Role in the Family and Old World Womanhood

Deborah's life exemplifies the destiny of Jewish women in the Pale, a destiny that Mary describes with both affection and critical distance. In the world of Polotzk, a girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, and where her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. A girl was born for no other purpose than to be a wife, and marriage was a sacrament, with parenthood the great career. To be left an old maid was the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl, and the family would strain every nerve to ward off that calamity. Deborah, married at thirteen, was the very model of this system, her life circumscribed by the kitchen and the marriage bed, her education limited to what a girl needed to read her prayers in Hebrew and follow the meaning by the Yiddish translation. Mary's own mother, Hannah Hayye, had a very different bringing-up from Pinchus, the grandson of Israel Kimanyer, and Deborah's household, with its comfortable home and good business, gave her a solid position in Polotzk.

Memory and Legacy

Though Mary remembers Grandma Deborah only from hearsay, the old woman's presence lingers in the family's memory as a counterpoint to the other grandmother, Rachel, whom Mary remembers distinctly as spare and trim and always busy. Grandma Rachel came in midwinter from the frozen village where she lived, wrapped in immense shawls, and brought treats of talakno, or oat flour, which the children mixed with cold water and ate raw with wooden spoons. Grandma Deborah's methods, by contrast, are known only through the stories of others, and her early death meant that Mary never knew her embrace. Yet Deborah's legacy is woven into the very texture of the memoir, for it was her marriage to Raphael that produced Hannah Hayye, and it was the fortune built by Raphael in Hode's train that made Mary's childhood pleasant. The memory of Deborah thus anchors the family's Old World past, even as Mary's own story carries the family into the New World, where the old customs of child betrothal and kitchen-bound womanhood give way to the freedoms of American girlhood.

Narrative Significance

Deborah's story serves as a quiet but essential foundation for Mary's meditation on the transformation of Jewish womanhood. Mary contrasts the fate of her grandmother, married at thirteen and finished with books after a couple of terms with a rebbetzin, with her own trajectory, which carried her from the Ghetto to the freedom of all America. The old dispensation that governed Deborah's life is the same dispensation that nearly claimed Mary's sister Frieda, who came to America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American girlhood and married at seventeen. Mary's own escape from that fate is measured against the generations of women like Deborah who had no choice, and whose lives were bounded by the kitchen, the marriage contract, and the hope of a good match. In this way, Grandma Deborah, known only through hearsay, becomes a symbol of the Old World that Mary both honors and leaves behind, her memory a testament to the world that made the family's emigration necessary and the American transformation possible.