Eidtkuhnen was the German frontier station where the Antin family crossed from Russia into Germany during their emigration to America, a threshold moment made possible by Herr Schidorsky's procurement of a pass and his brother's emigrant aid association. It marked the family's first step out of the Pale of Settlement and into the westward movement that would carry them to Boston.

The Frontier Crossing

Eidtkuhnen stood at the edge of the Russian Empire, the point where the Pale of Settlement ended and Germany began. For the Antin family, it was the first tangible proof that the fence around Polotzk—the invisible but absolute boundary that confined Jews to the Pale—could actually be crossed. The Czar commanded Jews to stay within the Pale, and the knowledge that Polotzk, Vitebsk, and Vilna were grouped together as the Pale had trickled into Mary Antin's consciousness drop by drop, until she understood she was a prisoner. Eidtkuhnen was the gate through which that imprisonment ended.

The crossing was made possible by Herr Schidorsky, who became the agent of the family's salvation. He procured Mary's mother a pass to Eidtkuhnen, the German frontier station, where his older brother, as chairman of a well-known emigrant aid association, arranged for the family's admission into Germany. During the negotiations, which took several days, the good man of Kibart entertained the family in his own house, shabby emigrants though they were. The Schidorsky brothers were Jews, but it was not on that account that their name has been lovingly remembered for fifteen years in the family.

The Journey's Context

The crossing at Eidtkuhnen came after years of hardship that had reduced the family to near destitution. Mary's father had emigrated first, traveling with borrowed money to a German port, whence he was forwarded to Boston at the expense of an emigrant aid society. The family had no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects. Mary's mother, as a bread-winner, had nothing like her former success; her health was permanently impaired, her place in the business world had long been filled by others, and there was no capital to start her anew. Her brothers did what they could, but they all had large families, with marriageable daughters and sons to be bought out of military service.

The day the steamer ticket arrived, the household erupted in 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. Before sunset the news was all over Polotzk that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America. Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors poured into the street from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota. Mary's mother gave audience, her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, receiving her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk.

The visitors pressed questions upon her: How much did the ticket cost? Was it all paid for? Were they going to have a foreign passport or did they intend to steal across the border? Were they not all going to have new dresses to travel in? Was it sure that they could get koscher food on the ship? They offered advice—she ought to make a pilgrimage to a Good Jew, say, the Rebbe of Lubavitch, to get his blessing; she must pack her prayer books and Bible, and twenty pounds of zwieback at the least; if they served trefah on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve unless she carried provisions from home; she must take all the featherbeds. Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, for the eleventh time repeating herself, begged Mary's mother to deliver a message to her son who had emigrated to America eighteen months ago and then vanished, sending one letter from Castle Garden and then nothing, not a postal card, not a word, as if the earth had swallowed him.

The Threshold and Its Aftermath

On the German side of Eidtkuhnen, the family's course joined that of many other emigrant groups on their way to Hamburg and other ports. They were a clumsy enough crowd, with wide, unsophisticated eyes, with awkward bundles hugged in their arms, and their hearts set on America. The letter to Mary's uncle faithfully described every stage of the bustling progress.

The crossing at Eidtkuhnen was the first step in the family's initiation into American ways, which continued from the first step on the new soil. On the way from the pier to Wall Street, crowded together in a rickety cab, Mary's father instructed the children not to lean out of the windows, not to point, and explained the word greenhorn. They did not want to be greenhorns, and gave the strictest attention to his instructions.

The significance of Eidtkuhnen lay not in what the family found there, but in what they left behind. The Pale had been a world of taxes on houses, rents, business, and profits; of excise duties on tobacco taxed at every step of its process; of police raids in the night and ruinous fines; of men who blinded themselves or went lame to escape the Czar's service. The crossing at Eidtkuhnen was the moment when that world, with its shackles grown familiar to the flesh, was finally left behind. It was the threshold between the prisoner's life and the promise of America, the point where the family's westward movement became irreversible.