Expulsion of Jews from Moscow

The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district was one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements whereby government officials cleared the forbidden cities of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law, they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the Pale, on payment of enormous bribes and at the cost of nameless risks and indignities. It struck at cruelly short notice, just before Passover, and the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear. For the Antin family in Polotzk, this was not an abstract political event but a lived catastrophe that reshaped their sense of home, faith, and future.

The Legal Cage of the Pale

The expulsion was the sharpest expression of a system that had already confined the Jews of Polotzk within the Pale of Settlement, a grouping of Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places within which the Czar commanded the Jews to stay. Within this area, the Czar commanded Mary Antin to remain with her father and mother and friends, and all other people like them, and they must not be found outside the Pale because they were Jews. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and this knowledge trickled into the child's consciousness drop by drop, so that by the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The expulsion of Jews from Moscow was the violent enforcement of this same principle, a reminder that even the illegal residents who had bought their place with bribes could be swept away at any moment.

The system bore down on Jews through conscription as well. Most men of twenty-one, the age of conscription, were already married and had children, and during their absence their families suffered and their business often was ruined. At the end of their term they were beggars, sent home with a free ticket for the return journey and a few kopecks a day for expenses, hurried back into the Pale like escaped prisoners. The Czar was done with them, and if within a limited time they were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in chains. The expulsion of Jews from Moscow was the same logic applied to entire families at once, a mass version of the individual punishment meted out to conscripts.

The economic burden of the Czar's demands was equally crushing. The Jews paid taxes on their houses, taxes on the rents from the houses, taxes on their business, taxes on their profits, and the town collected taxes, and the county, and the central government, and the chief of police was always with them. There were taxes for public works, but rotten pavements went on rotting year after year, and when a bridge was to be built, special taxes were levied. A railroad bridge across the Dvina, while open to the military, could be used by the people only by individual permission. Business really did not pay when the price of goods was so swollen by taxes that the people could not buy, and the only way to make business pay was to cheat the Government of part of the duties, a dangerous game with so many spies watching the Czar's interests. The constant risk, the worry, the dread of a police raid in the night, and the ruinous fines in case of detection left very little margin of profit or comfort to the dealer in contraband goods.

The Panic and the Flight

When the expulsion was announced, the Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. Hundreds of fugitives, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their tears with the tears that never dried. The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man's chance of making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.

The timing of the expulsion, just before Passover, made the disaster cut even deeper into the religious life of the community. Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus, the Jews would have read a chapter of current history, only for them there was no deliverer and no promised land. The ancient narrative of liberation from Egypt, which should have been a source of hope, became instead a bitter mirror of their own unending captivity.

The Turn Toward America

But at the end of the long Passover service, some of the worshippers did not say "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but rather "Next year—in America!" So there was their promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West. And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought. The expulsion of Jews from Moscow thus became a turning point not only of fear but of aspiration, redirecting the communal longing from the ancient holy city to the new world across the sea.

This turn toward America was already embodied in Mary Antin's father, who had emigrated three years before the family followed. Almost his first act on landing on American soil had been his application for naturalization, and he had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, becoming a citizen of the United States at the earliest moment allowed by the law. It is true that he had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to America. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only a young man when he landed, thirty-two, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was hungry for his untasted manhood.

The contrast between the two worlds could not have been starker. In Russia, the expulsion of Jews from Moscow was the latest in a series of disasters that made the Jews prisoners in their own land. In America, the Constitution of the United States guaranteed the freedom that the Czar denied. When Mary Antin later found herself in a schoolyard dispute, accused of heresy by her classmates, she reminded them that "This is a free country," and she knew from her father's teaching that the persecution of her beliefs was contrary to the Constitution of the United States. George Washington would not have treated her as her tormentors were doing. The same lesson was reinforced when a great, hulky colored boy who treated her roughly was arrested and brought to court, locked up overnight, and emerged with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. In the little courtroom, bearded Arlington Street stood against wool-headed Arlington Street, and nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to. They were all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution. The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia.

The expulsion of Jews from Moscow thus stands as the dark background against which the American promise shines. It was the event that made the family's emigration not a choice but a necessity, and it gave the child Mary Antin a lifelong understanding of what it meant to be a prisoner and what it meant to be free. The memory of the expulsion, and of the tears of that Passover, would inform her gratitude for every American institution, from the public school where she learned to read English to the courtroom where justice was actually administered. The disaster that scattered hundreds of families into the Pale also scattered the seeds of the great migration westward, and in that migration, the Antin family found not only safety but a new identity as citizens of a free country.