East Boston

East Boston appears in Mary Antin's memoir as the neighborhood where her elder sister Frieda goes to live after her marriage to Moses Rifkin. This move, which takes place before the family's own relocation to Dover Street, is a pivotal moment in the family's domestic history: it leaves Mary as the eldest of the children still at home, a change that coincides with her increasing attention to the family's precarious financial situation. East Boston thus functions less as a vividly described locale than as a marker of Frieda's transition out of the parental household and into a new life, and as the geographic point that reorders the Antin family's internal dynamics.

Frieda's Marriage and the Move to East Boston

Frieda's engagement to Moses Rifkin is presented as a welcome development from Mary's perspective. Mary is very fond of Moses Rifkin, describing him as the nicest young man of her acquaintance, not at all like other workmen. He is kind to the children, bringing them presents and taking them out for excursions, and he has a sense of humor. Mary's affection for him is inseparable from her joy that he is going to marry Frieda. The marriage itself is delayed for some time, during which Frieda remains in the shop and continues to bring home all her wages, determined not to let the family feel her impending departure sooner than necessary. When the wedding finally takes place, Frieda goes to live in East Boston, and this removal is recorded as the event that leaves Mary the eldest of the children at home.

The move to East Boston is framed within the larger context of the family's financial struggles. Mary's father had put Frieda to work out of necessity, and the marriage is understood as a release from the workshop, an escape while the roses are still in her cheeks. The act is described as a sacrifice on the father's part, for he is still in the woods financially and will sorely miss Frieda's wages. The narrator reflects that there was no one to counsel him to give America more time with her, noting that Frieda attended night school and was fond of reading, and that in books and a slowly ripening experience she might have found a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a premature marriage. East Boston, in this light, is the destination that ends Frieda's working life and begins her married one, even as it deprives the family of her steady contribution.

The Family's Financial Straits and Mary's New Role

Frieda's departure to East Boston coincides with a period of acute hardship for the Antin family. Mary's father seeks employment wherever work is going on, but his health is poor and he ages very fast. He offers himself for every kind of labor, even for a boy's wages, yet is found too weak, too old, his imperfect English in the way, his Jewish appearance against him. He has a few short terms of work at this or that, but all told he does not earn enough to pay the rent in full and buy a bone for the soup. The only steady source of income for years is Mary's brother's earnings from his newspapers. It is in this context that Mary begins to take bread-and-butter matters more to heart and to ponder ways and means of getting rich, a shift she attributes partly to becoming the eldest child at home after Frieda's marriage.

Mary reflects that this was surely the time for her to take her sister's place in the workshop. She has had every fair chance until now: school, her time to herself, liberty to run and play and make friends. She has graduated from grammar school and is of legal age to go to work. Yet she finds herself sitting at home and dreaming, a tension that defines her position in the wake of Frieda's move to East Boston. The neighborhood where Frieda now lives thus stands as a quiet counterpoint to Mary's own unresolved path, the place where the elder sister's fate has been settled while the younger one's remains open.

East Boston in the Geography of the Memoir

East Boston is one of several Boston neighborhoods that structure the memoir's geography of immigrant life. Unlike the vividly rendered slums of Wheeler Street and Dover Street, or the aristocratic refinement of Beacon Street and the Back Bay, East Boston is mentioned only in passing, as the place where Frieda lives after her marriage. It does not receive the descriptive treatment accorded to Harrison Avenue, the heart of the South End ghetto, with its pushcarts and open-air stands bursting through narrow shop doors, or to Dover Street, intersected near its eastern end by Harrison Avenue. Nor does it figure in the contrasts Mary draws between the reeking slums and the satin drawing-rooms where she drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as their porcelain cups. Instead, East Boston functions as a domestic landmark, a name that marks the boundary of the original family unit and the beginning of Mary's assumption of elder-sisterly responsibility. Its significance is structural rather than scenic, a place whose importance lies in what it represents for the Antin family's internal order rather than in any distinctive character of its own.