Father's Emigration to America

Father's Emigration to America marks the decisive rupture in the Antin family's Russian life, the moment when Pinchus Antin, driven by poverty and the anti-Semitic expulsions of the period, sets out alone for Boston and transforms the abstract word "America" into the fixed center of his daughter Mary's dreams. It is the hinge on which the entire memoir turns: the event that separates the old world of Polotzk from the new world of promise, and the first step in the family's collective journey toward Americanization. The departure is not merely a geographical move but a spiritual and emotional watershed, one that Mary, then about ten years old, experiences with a mixture of vicarious excitement and dawning comprehension that would shape her identity for years to come.

The Circumstances of Departure

The emigration came at the end of a long decline. The family had been driven back into poverty when the mill where Pinchus worked changed hands and the new owner installed a protégé of his own in his place. For the next year or so, Pinchus spent his time in a restless and fruitless search for a permanent position, while his wife's health remained permanently impaired and his own was precarious. What he earned did not more than half pay the bills, even though the family was living very humbly. Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him. It was just at this time that one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements occurred, whereby government officials cleared the forbidden cities of Jews who, in the intervals of slack administration, were allowed to maintain an illegal residence outside the Pale on payment of enormous bribes and at the cost of nameless risks and indignities. The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice was the latest disaster, and the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear. Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight, while those in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. Passover was celebrated in tears that year, and at the end of the long service, many said not "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year—in America!"

Pinchus was carried away by this westward movement, glad of his own deliverance but sore at heart for the family he left behind. It was the last chance for all of them. They were so far reduced in circumstances that he had to travel with borrowed money to a German port, whence he was forwarded to Boston, with a host of others, at the expense of an emigrant aid society. The family had no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects, and hardly knew where they belonged in the simple scheme of their society. 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 for her, but they all had large families with marriageable daughters and sons to be bought out of military service, and the allowance they made her was generous compared to their means, though there were four growing children to support.

The Letter That Changed Everything

Mary was about ten years old when her father emigrated, and she was used to his going away from home. "America" did not mean much more to her than "Kherson," or "Odessa," or any other names of distant places. She understood vaguely, from the gravity with which his plans were discussed and from references to ships, societies, and other unfamiliar things, that this enterprise was different from previous ones, but her excitement and emotion on the morning of his departure were mainly vicarious. The transformation came later, on the day she knew with certainty when "America" as a world entirely unlike Polotzk lodged in her brain, to become the centre of all her dreams and speculations. She was in bed, sharing the measles with some of the other children, when her mother brought them a thick letter from her father, written just before boarding the ship. The letter was full of excitement, containing something besides the description of travel, besides the pictures of crowds of people, of foreign cities, of a ship ready to put out to sea. Her father was travelling at the expense of a charitable organization, without means of his own, without plans, to a strange world where he had no friends, and yet he wrote with the confidence of a well-equipped soldier going into battle. The rhetoric was Mary's own; her father simply wrote that the emigration committee was taking good care of everybody, that the weather was fine, and the ship comfortable. But she heard something, as they read the letter together in the darkened room, that was more than the words seemed to say. There was an elation, a hint of triumph, such as had never been in her father's letters before. She felt a stirring, a straining in the letter, even though her mother stumbled over strange words and cried, as women will when somebody is going away. Her father was inspired by a vision; he saw something, he promised them something, and it was this "America." And "America" became her dream.

The Years of Waiting and Preparation

The years that followed were a period of suspended life, lived in a quiver of expectation. Mary spent time in Vitebsk, where her books, her walks, and her visits as teacher to many homes were so many doors opening on a wider world, so many horizons one beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched, and she had filled her lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond. Child though she was, Polotzk, when she came back, was too small for her. And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began to shrink in her imagination as America loomed near. Her father's letters warned them to prepare for the summons. He was so far from rich that he was going to borrow every cent of the money for their third-class passage, but he had a business in view which he could carry on all the better for having the family with him. With the children, he argued, every year in Russia was a year lost; they should be spending the precious years in school, in learning English, in becoming Americans. United in America, there were ten chances of their getting to their feet again to one chance in their scattered, aimless state.

When the steamer ticket finally arrived, the news was all over Polotzk before sunset that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America. Then they began to come: friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors, from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere, a steady stream pouring into their street both day and night till the hour of their departure. 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, and she conducted herself appropriately, giving her heart's thanks for the congratulations and blessings, ready tears for condolences, patient answers to monotonous questions, and handshakes and kisses and hugs gratis. The visitors wanted to handle the ticket, asked how much it cost, whether it was all paid for, whether they were going to have a foreign passport or intended to steal across the border, whether they were all going to have new dresses to travel in, and whether it was sure that they could get koscher food on the ship. They poured in suggestions and solid chunks of advice, that mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a "Good Jew" to get his blessing on the journey, that she must be sure and pack her prayer books and Bible and twenty pounds of zwieback at the least, that if they did serve trefah on the ship she and the four children would have to starve unless she carried provisions from home, and that she must take all the featherbeds. Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, for the eleventh time repeating herself, begged a promise, telling of a son who had emigrated to America eighteen months ago, fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new, who had sent one letter describing his arrival at Castle Garden and how well he was received, and then not a postal card, not a word, just as if he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him.

The Father's Transformation in America

During his three years of probation in America, Pinchus made a number of false starts in business. His history for that period is the history of thousands who come to America like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in their native land. He shuffled from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons, bent over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor shop, rummaged in ash cans, and moved a pushcart from curb to curb at the command of the burly policeman. He was not prepared to make a living even in America, where the day laborer eats wheat instead of rye. Apparently the American flag could not protect him against the pursuing Nemesis of his limitations; he must expiate the sins of his fathers who slept across the seas. He had been endowed at birth with a poor constitution, a nervous, restless temperament, and an abundance of hindering prejudices. In his boyhood his body was starved, that his mind might be stuffed with useless learning; in his youth this dearly gotten learning was sold, and the price was the bread and salt which he had not been trained to earn for himself. Under the wedding canopy he was bound for life to a girl whose features were still strange to him, and he was bidden to multiply himself, that sacred learning might be perpetuated in his sons.

Yet 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. Almost his first act on landing on American soil had been his application for naturalization. He had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United States. 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. When the family finally arrived, his initiation into American ways began with the first step on the new soil; he found occasion to instruct or correct them even on the way from the pier to Wall Street, which journey they made crowded together in a rickety cab. He told them 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 Legacy of the Departure

The father's emigration set in motion a process of disintegration and reinvention that would define the family's American life. Having renounced his faith, and with his wife uncertain of hers, they had no particular creed to hold their children to, and the conception of a system of ethics independent of religion could not at once enter as an active principle in their life. Chaos took the place of system; uncertainty, inconsistency undermined discipline. In their bewilderment they must trust their children to learn from such models as the tenements afforded, and step down from their throne of parental authority, taking the law from their children's mouths, for they had no other means of finding out what was good American form. This sad process of disintegration of home life may be observed in almost any immigrant family of their class and with their traditions and aspirations; it is part of the process of Americanization, an upheaval preceding the state of repose, the cross that the first and second generations must bear, an involuntary sacrifice for the sake of the future generations. And as the mother forgets her agonies in the bliss of clasping her babe to her breast, so the bent and heart-sore immigrant forgets exile and homesickness and ridicule and loss and estrangement when he beholds his sons and daughters moving as Americans among Americans. The father's solitary departure, undertaken with borrowed money and the charity of an emigrant aid society, was the first act of that sacrifice, the seed of the Americanization that would remake the entire family, and the proof that the promise he had glimpsed and communicated to his daughter in a letter read by lamplight in a darkened room was real enough to sustain them through the years of poverty, dislocation, and transformation that followed.