Fetchke

Fetchke, the eldest of the four Antin children, is introduced in the family portrait of their Polotzk household as "always the good little girl," a phrase that quietly seals her fate. She is the firstborn, followed by Mary, the second child and the book's heroine; the third is Joseph, the only brother, named for the father's father; and the fourth is Deborah, named for the mother's mother. In the crowded family wing, with its parasitic cousins and constant coming and going of merchants and peddlers, Fetchke's goodness is not merely a temperament but a role—the reliable one, the helper, the one on whom the household depends. Her very name, in its Polotzk diminutive, carries the weight of expectation, and the narrative will show how that expectation, transplanted to America, becomes the instrument of her sacrifice.

The Mother's Kitchen and the Girl's Destiny

Fetchke's childhood in Polotzk is shaped by the iron law that a girl's real schoolroom is her mother's kitchen. There she learns to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, while her mother instructs her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. The lesson is absolute: a girl was born for no other purpose than to be a wife. Marriage was a sacrament among the Jews of the Pale, and to rear a family of children was to serve God; while men might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood. To be left an old maid was the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl, and every nerve of the girl and her family was strained to ward off that calamity. Fetchke, as the eldest daughter, absorbs this destiny early and completely. She is like a young colt inseparable from the mare, keeping close to her mother at first for love and protection, but the petting she gets becomes a blind for discipline. She learns early, from her mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for labor, that she must bow to the yoke, lift burdens, and do more for others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn. She learns to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share, and when she is only fit to nurse her dolls, she learns how to comfort a weary heart.

Her winter confinement is not shared by her younger sister. Fetchke goes out more than Mary, not being so afraid of the cold, and she frets so when her mother is away in the store that it becomes a custom for her to accompany her mother from the time she is a mere baby. Muffled and rosy and frost-bitten, the tears of cold rolling unnoticed down her plump cheeks, she runs after her busy mother all day long, or tumbles about behind the counter, or nestles for a nap among the bulging sacks of oats and barley. She warms her little hands over her mother's pot of glowing charcoal—there is no stove in the store—and even learns to stand astride of it, for further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire. This is the apprenticeship of the eldest daughter: not to books, but to the endless, unglamorous labor of keeping a household and a family alive.

The Renaming and the Parting of Ways

When the family lands in America, the first act of transformation is the shedding of their impossible Hebrew names. A committee of friends, several years ahead of them in American experience, puts their heads together and concocts American names for them all. Fetchke issues as Frieda, Joseph as Joseph, and Deborah as Dora, while the mother, possessing a name not easily translatable, is punished with the undignified nickname of Annie. Mary, whose Hebrew name Maryashe is already close to English, is simply cheated, longing as she does for a strange-sounding American name like the others. But the renaming of Fetchke into Frieda is more than a linguistic convenience; it marks the beginning of her separation from her sister's path. The family tradition holds that Mary is the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers can be no common lot. Frieda is relied upon for help, and her sister for glory. When Mary fails as a milliner's apprentice while Frieda makes excellent progress at the dressmaker's, their fates are sealed. It is understood, even before they reach Boston, that Frieda will go to work and Mary to school.

The first day at school makes the division stark and painful. Mary is led to the schoolroom, with its sunshine and its singing and the teacher's cheery smile, while Frieda is led to the workshop, with its foul air, care-lined faces, and the foreman's stern command. Their going to school is the fulfilment of the father's best promises, and Frieda's share in it is to fashion and fit the calico frocks in which the baby sister and Mary make their first appearance in a public schoolroom. Mary remembers to this day the gray pattern of the calico, so affectionately does she regard it as her consecration robe awaiting the beatific day. And Frieda, Mary is sure, remembers it too, so longingly does she regard it as the crisp, starchy breadths of it slide between her fingers. But whatever her longings, she says nothing of them; she bends over the sewing-machine humming an Old-World melody. In every straight, smooth seam, perhaps, she tucks away some lingering impulse of childhood, but she matches the scrolls and flowers with the utmost care. When the momentous day arrives, it is Frieda herself who pats and smooths Mary's stiff new calico, who makes her turn round and round to see that she is perfect, who stoops to pull out a disfiguring basting-thread. If there is anything in her heart besides sisterly love and pride and good-will, as they part that morning, it is a sense of loss and a woman's acquiescence in her fate; for they had been close friends, and now their ways would lie apart. Longing she feels, but no envy. She does not grudge Mary what she is denied. Until that morning they had been children together, but now, at the fiat of her destiny, she becomes a woman, with all a woman's cares, whilst Mary, so little younger, is bidden to dance at the May festival of untroubled childhood.

The Marriage at Seventeen

Before they have been two years in America, Frieda is engaged to be married. This is under the old dispensation: Frieda came to America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American girlhood. Had she been two years younger, Mary reflects, she might have dodged her circumstances, evaded her Old-World fate. She would have gone to school and imbibed American ideas. She might have clung to her girlhood longer instead of marrying at seventeen. Mary is so fond of the American way that it has always seemed to her a pitiful accident that her sister should have come so near and missed by so little the fulfilment of her country's promise to women. A long girlhood, a free choice in marriage, and a brimful womanhood are the precious rights of an American woman, and Frieda, by a margin of two years, is denied them all. The father, too recently from the Old World to be entirely free from the influence of its social traditions, had put Frieda to work out of necessity. The necessity is hardly lifted when she has an offer of marriage, but the father will not stand in the way of what he considers her welfare. Let her escape from the workshop, if she has a chance, while the roses are still in her cheeks. If she remained for ten years more bent over the needle, what would she gain? Not even her personal comfort; for Frieda never calls her earnings her own, but spends everything on the family, denying herself all but necessities. The young man who sues for her is a good workman, earning fair wages, of irreproachable character, and refined manners, and the father has known him for years. So Frieda is to be released from the workshop. The act is really in the nature of a sacrifice on the father's part, for he is still in the woods financially and will sorely miss Frieda's wages. The greater the pity, therefore, that there is no one to counsel him to give America more time with his daughter. She attends the night school; she is fond of reading. In books, in a slowly ripening experience, she might have found a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a premature marriage.

The Devoted Sister and the Family's Support

Throughout the narrative, Frieda's devotion is the quiet engine of the family's survival and of Mary's success. She not only stands by approvingly when Mary is helped to everything; she cheerfully waits on her. Mary, in retrospect, is ashamed to recall that she did not consider how little it was that contented her sister, so preoccupied was she with her own happiness that she did not half perceive the splendid devotion of Frieda's attitude towards her, the sweetness of her joy in Mary's good luck. Frieda's earnings, never her own, go entirely to the family, and even after her marriage the pattern of self-denial continues. The grocer on Harrison Avenue, Mr. Rosenblum, who supplies the family on a perilous credit system, knows very well who it is that burns so much oil in the family—the scholar, Mary—but when she comes in to have her kerosene can filled, he does not fall upon her with harsh words of blame. Instead, he wants to hear about her latest triumph at school, and about the great people who write her letters and even come to see her, and he calls his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who cannot sign her name, comes out in her faded calico wrapper, and stands with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before the embryo scholar, nodding her head sideways in approval, drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of Mary's tale. The grocer knows, as well as the landlady Mrs. Hutch, that the father keeps a daughter at school who is of age to be put to work, but so far is he from reproaching him for it that he detains the father by the half-hour, inquiring about Mary's progress and discussing her future. The contrast is implicit: Frieda, the daughter who did go to work, is the one who makes Mary's schooling possible, and her sacrifice is so complete that it is almost invisible, absorbed into the seams of the calico dresses and the weekly wages handed over without a word.

The Unfinished Story and the Tent in the Wilderness

Mary's own narrative ends with a deliberate refusal to tell the rest of the story. She goes to college, not to Radcliffe as she had proposed, but to Barnard College, receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse. There she takes all the honors that she deserved, and if she did not learn to write poetry, as she once supposed she should, she learned at least to think in English without an accent. She earns enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears and satisfy all her wants, and her favorite abode is a tent in the wilderness, where she shall be happy to serve a cup of tea out of a tin kettle. But a long chapter of the romance of Dover Street is left untold, and Frieda's story, too, is left unfinished. The memoir traces the way an immigrant child may take from the ship through the public schools, passed on from hand to hand by the ready teachers, through free libraries and lecture halls, inspired by every occasion of civic consciousness, dragging through the slums the weight of private disadvantage but heartened for the effort by public opportunity. Frieda is the shadow side of that triumphant trajectory—the one who did not pass through the schoolroom door, who was led instead to the workshop, and whose girlhood was cut short by a marriage at seventeen. Her story is the cost of Mary's Americanization, the unspoken price of the promised land. The book's celebration of American freedom is thus shadowed by the figure of the elder sister, whose devotion made the dream possible and whose own dream was deferred by the very circumstances that enabled her sister's triumph. In the end, Frieda remains the good little girl of the Polotzk household, grown into the good woman of the American family, her longings tucked away in straight, smooth seams, her story told only through the sister who remembers the gray pattern of the calico and the humming of the Old-World melody.