Four Questions

The Four Questions, known in Hebrew as Ma Nishtana, stand at the heart of the Passover Seder as the ritual by which the youngest child present asks why this night is different from all other nights. In Mary Antin's memoir, this ancient practice carries a double weight: it is the most intimate memory of her Polotzk childhood, the moment when a Jewish child first takes an active part in the sacred drama of deliverance, and it becomes, in retrospect, the touchstone against which she measures the distance she has traveled from the Pale of Settlement to America. The questions are not merely a liturgical form but a hinge between generations, between the Old World and the New, between the child who asked them in Yiddish-accented Hebrew and the woman who would later eat ham at a Christian tea table and declare herself a freethinker.

The Ritual and Its Meaning

The Four Questions are posed at the Passover feast by the youngest son, or, in the absence of a son of suitable age, by a daughter, who asks about the significance of the various symbolic articles on the table. The questions concern the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the other ritual foods, each of which carries the memory of the Exodus from Egypt. In Polotzk, the asking was embedded in a household transformed for the occasion: the house was made clean and shining and holy, even in the corners where nobody ever looked; the vessels and dishes used all the year round were put away in the garret, and special vessels were brought out for the Passover week. Mary helped unpack the new dishes and find her own blue mug. When the fresh curtains were put up, the white floors were uncovered, and everybody in the house put on new clothes, she sat down to the feast in her new dress, feeling clean inside and out. When she asked the Four Questions, the family, reading from their books, answered her, and she knew all about Passover, what was on the table, and why. The youngest child in the house knew how Passover was kept, and the questions were the proof of that knowledge.

The ritual was also a declaration of belonging. The family's answering of the questions, reading from their books in unison, was a collective affirmation that the child was now old enough to participate in the central mystery of Jewish identity: the celebration of deliverance from the land of Egypt, felt so glad and thankful, as if it had only just happened. The questions were the child's entry into the covenant, the moment when she ceased to be a passive observer and became a questioner, an active seeker of meaning. In this sense, the Four Questions were the first intellectual act of the Jewish child, the first time she was invited to ask why, and to receive an answer that bound her to her people and their history.

The Questions and the Pogroms

The Passover season, when the Jews celebrated their deliverance from Egypt, was precisely the time their Gentile neighbors chose to remind them that Russia was another Egypt. The same festival that produced the Four Questions, the clean house, and the new dress also produced the blood libel: the wicked lie that the Jews used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival. Mary knew this accusation was false because she knew everything that was done for Passover, from the time she was a very little girl. The lie made her sick to think of it. The Gentiles said that the Jews had killed their God, which was absurd, as they never had a God, nothing but images; and they considered it pious to hate and abuse the Jews, insisting that they had killed their God. To worship the cross and to torment a Jew was the same thing to them. In Russian cities, and even more in the country districts, the Gentiles made the Passover a time of horror for the Jews. Somebody would start up that lie about murdering Christian children, and the stupid peasants would get mad about it, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill the Jews, attacking them with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killing them or torturing them, and burning their houses. This was called a pogrom. Jews who escaped the pogroms came to Polotzk with wounds on them, and horrible stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mothers' eyes. The Four Questions, the innocent voice of the youngest child, thus stood in stark opposition to the murderous lies of the Gentile world: the child asked why this night was different, and the answer was deliverance, while the Gentiles answered with violence and slander.

The Questions as Memory and Loss

The Four Questions belong to the cluster of Polotzk memories that Mary treasured most, memories of eating and drinking that she would sooner keep than her delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all. The Sabbath suppers at the end of those walks, the thick cheese cakes on Saturday night, the cherries eaten with the stones in a contest with a boy set to watch a store while Cousin Shimke made cherry preserves: these were the flavors of childhood, and the Four Questions were the ritual frame around the feast. The Passover table, with its special dishes and its new clothes, was the setting in which the child's voice was heard and answered. The memory of the questions was inseparable from the memory of the food, the family, the clean house, the blue mug. When Mary later stood under laden cherry trees in America and ate cherries with the stones, she found that the fruit had no such flavor to yield as she sought; the old species of cherry was extinct in Polotzk, and the flavor could not be imported. The same loss applied to the ritual itself: the Four Questions, asked in the holy atmosphere of the Polotzk Passover, could not be reproduced in America, where the sacred and the secular, the Jewish and the Gentile, were no longer so sharply divided.

The loss was also a liberation. The Four Questions were the child's first exercise in asking why, and that habit of questioning would carry Mary far beyond the boundaries of the Passover table. The same child who asked about the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs would later question Reb' Lebe about God, would declare her freethought in the schoolyard, would eat ham at Miss Dillingham's tea table, and would enter the Latin School and then Barnard College. The questions were the seed of her intellectual life, the first permission to inquire, and the answers she received in Polotzk were the answers of tradition; in America, she would ask new questions and receive new answers. The Four Questions thus mark the beginning of a trajectory that leads from the Passover Seder to the public school, from the Hebrew prayer book to the Boston Public Library, from the Pale to the college gate.

The Questions and the American Transformation

The Four Questions also illuminate the fate of those who came to America too late to ask them in the new tongue. Mary's sister Frieda, who was the oldest, the strongest, the best prepared, and the only one of legal age to be put to work, was denied the American girlhood that Mary enjoyed. Frieda came to America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American girlhood; had she been two years younger, she might have dodged her circumstances, evaded her Old-World fate, gone to school and imbibed American ideas, clung to her girlhood longer instead of marrying at seventeen. The Four Questions, asked by the youngest child, were a privilege of youth, and Frieda, who was older, was already past the age of asking. She was relied upon for help, and her sister for glory; the family tradition held that Mary was the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers could be no common lot. When Mary failed as a milliner's apprentice while Frieda made excellent progress at the dressmaker's, their fates were sealed: Frieda would go to work and Mary to school. The Four Questions, in this light, were not merely a ritual but a marker of which child would be permitted to remain a child, to ask questions, to be educated, to become American. Frieda, who had no such privilege, bent over the sewing-machine humming an Old-World melody, tucking away some lingering impulse of childhood in every straight, smooth seam, while her little sister was bidden to dance at the May festival of untroubled childhood.

The Four Questions, finally, are the emblem of what Mary gained and what she left behind. She went to college, not to Radcliffe but to Barnard, where she took all the honors that she deserved and learned to think in English without an accent. She earned enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears and satisfy all her wants. Her favorite abode became a tent in the wilderness, where she would serve a cup of tea out of a tin kettle. The child who asked the Four Questions in Polotzk became the woman who could not bear to prod and turn her yesterdays, who found that the past and present meet at a point where her yesterdays lie in a quick heap. The Four Questions were the first questions she ever asked, and the asking never stopped; but the answers changed, and the change was America itself. The ritual that began as the youngest child's entry into the covenant of Passover became the lifelong habit of a mind that could not stop asking why, and that found in the American public school, the free library, and the college gate a new kind of deliverance, as real as the Exodus from Egypt.