Deborah Antin

Deborah Antin, known in America as Dora, is the youngest of the four Antin children, the baby of the family in Polotzk. In the crowded family wing of the house, where there were four children besides father, mother, grandmother, and the parasitic cousins, Deborah was the fourth, named for her mother's mother. Her principal characteristic in those early years was single-mindedness: if she had teething to attend to, she thought of nothing else day or night and communicated with the family on no other subject; if it was whooping-cough, she whooped most heartily; if it was measles, she had them thick. This portrait of the baby as a creature of total absorption in her own bodily states is the first and defining image of her, and it sets the terms for how she appears throughout the narrative: a child whose inner life is intense but largely inaccessible to others, and whose physical condition is the primary channel of her self-expression.

The Symbol of the Fallen Family State

The most striking and painful image of Deborah comes when Mary returns from Vitebsk, where she had been sent to learn the milliner's trade. Unwilling to spoil her holiday, her mother had not written how things had gone from bad to worse, and Mary was not prepared. Fetchke met her at the station and conducted her to a more wretched hole than she had ever called home before. Mary went into the room alone, having been greeted outside by her mother and brother. It was evening, and the shabbiness of the apartment was all the gloomier for the light of a small kerosene lamp standing on the bare deal table. At one end of the table sat Deborah, dressed in an ugly gray jacket, motionless in the lamplight, her fair head drooping, her little hands folded on the edge of the table. At sight of her, Mary grew suddenly old. It was merely that she was a shy little girl, unbecomingly dressed, and perhaps a little pale from underfeeding, but to Mary at that moment she was the personification of dejection, the living symbol of the fallen family state. The image is the emotional climax of the family's decline: the baby who had once been a creature of pure single-minded physicality is now a silent, drooping figure of poverty, and her stillness in the lamplight becomes the emblem of everything the family has lost.

Americanization and the New Name

With the despised immigrant clothing, the family shed also their impossible Hebrew names. A committee of friends, several years ahead of them in American experience, put their heads together and concocted American names for them all. Those of their real names that had no pleasing American equivalents were ruthlessly discarded, content if they retained the initials. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora, respectively. Deborah thus became Dora, a name that carried no trace of her Hebrew origin, and the change marks her complete absorption into the American project. Unlike Mary, who was disappointed that her name held good in English as Mary and who longed for a strange-sounding American name like the others, Dora received a name that was entirely new, a clean break from the Old World. The renaming is part of the larger process of Americanization that the family underwent with such diligence and adaptability that when they made the journey to Crescent Beach, in the wake of their small wagon-load of household goods, their father had very little occasion to admonish them on the way.

The Household Division of Labor

The family's American life was organized around a strict division of labor that fell hardest on the older children. In the household after school duties were done, Joseph sold newspapers after school; Mary swept and washed dishes; and Dora minded the baby. This assignment of the youngest to mind the baby is a continuation of the pattern established in Polotzk, where the children's roles were determined by age and gender. The family's discipline was loose at this time, with father and mother preoccupied with the store day and night, figuring out how long it would take the outstanding accounts to ruin the business entirely. In this atmosphere of neglect, Dora's task of minding the baby was her contribution to the family economy, a role that kept her within the domestic sphere even as her older siblings were sent out into the world of school and work. The contrast with Frieda, who was put to work at the dressmaker's and whose wages supported the family, and with Mary, who was sent to school, shows how the youngest child was absorbed into the household's daily operations without any of the drama that attended the older children's fates.

Life in the South End Tenement

In the South End tenement on Harrison Avenue, the heart of the ghetto, Dora shared the little front bedroom with Mary. The room was so small that a mouse could not have led a cat much of a chase across it, yet they found space for a narrow bed, a crazy bureau, and a small table. From the window there was an unobstructed view of a lumberyard, beyond which frowned the blackened walls of a factory, and the fence of the lumberyard was gay with theatre posters and illustrated advertisements of tobacco, whiskey, and patent baby foods. When the window was open, there was a constant clang and whirr of electric cars, varied by the screech of machinery, the clatter of empty wagons, or the rumble of heavy trucks. The two sisters shared this cramped space, and Mary notes that she did not enjoy any degree of privacy because she had half a room to herself; they were six in the five rooms and were bound to be always in each other's way. Dora's presence in this room is the closest the narrative comes to showing her daily life, and it is a life of extreme physical proximity and noise, a stark contrast to the quiet, lamplit image of her in the Polotzk apartment.

The Fate of the Youngest in the American Transition

Dora's story is told almost entirely through the eyes of her older sister, and she remains a peripheral figure whose inner life is never directly explored. Unlike Frieda, whose engagement and marriage are described in detail, and unlike Mary, whose education and ambitions form the core of the narrative, Dora appears only in brief, vivid snapshots: the single-minded baby, the drooping child in the lamplight, the girl renamed Dora, the sister sharing a cramped bedroom. This peripheral quality is itself significant. She is too young to have experienced the Old World as a conscious participant, and too young to have been caught in the dramatic conflicts between the generations that shaped her older siblings' fates. She is, in a sense, the pure product of the American transition, a child who was made over without the struggle that marked her sisters' journeys. The narrative's treatment of her suggests that the youngest children of immigrant families, those who were too young to remember the Old World, were absorbed into American life with the least friction but also with the least individual definition, their stories folded into the collective family saga rather than told on their own terms.