Hannah Hayye

Hannah Hayye, the mother of Mary Antin, stands at the center of The Promised Land as the family's emotional and practical anchor, a figure whose life story spans the two worlds the memoir contrasts. She is introduced as the only daughter of Raphael, called the Russian, a man of solid position in Polotzk who owned a comfortable home and a good business. Unlike her future husband Pinchus, the grandson of Israel Kimanyer, Hannah Hayye had never known a day of want and had never gone barefoot from necessity. This background of relative prosperity shaped her into a capable and respected woman, one whose identity was so tied to her father that the people of Polotzk continued to call her "Raphael's Hannah Hayye" even after her marriage, and under that name she was greatly respected in the business world.

Business Acumen and Family Leadership

Hannah Hayye's role as the family's leader was established early and maintained throughout their life in Polotzk. As her mother had been trained to business from childhood while her father had only a little irregular experience, she naturally remained the leader in their joint ventures. She was as successful as her father before her, and her establishment was gradually enlarged until the family had a solid position in Polotzk, with plenty to envy them. This competence extended to the domestic sphere, where she kept a cook, a nursemaid, and a dvornik, or outdoor man, to care for the horses, the cow, and the woodpile. The household was always full, with cousins and aunts about, and merchants, traders, country peddlers, peasants, soldiers, and minor government officials coming and going in the wing set apart for business guests, especially during fairs and at the season of the military draft.

Her partnership with Pinchus was one of equals, though her practical skills often carried the family. They tried keeping a wayside inn but gave it up because the life was too rough for her while she was expecting her first baby. Returning to Polotzk, they went to storekeeping on their own account but failed because her husband was inexperienced and she, now with a baby to nurse, could not give her best attention to business. When Pinchus traveled as far east as Tchistopol on the Volga and south as far as Odessa on the Black Sea, eventually becoming assistant superintendent in a distillery with a salary of thirty rubles a month, it was the death of her father Raphael that brought him back, leaving her heir to a good business. Her training from childhood meant that when her husband returned after nearly three years' absence, she remained the leader of the family enterprise.

The Exodus from Polotzk

The arrival of the steamer ticket for America transformed Hannah Hayye into the heroine of Polotzk. On that day she did not go out with her basket, and before sunset the news was all over the city that she 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, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, in a steady stream that lasted day and night until the hour of departure. Hannah Hayye gave audience to them all, 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 gave her heart's thanks for congratulations and blessings, ready tears for condolences, patient answers to monotonous questions, and handshakes, kisses, and hugs gratis. The eager, foolish, friendly people asked her everything: they wanted to handle the ticket, to know how much it cost, whether it was all paid for, whether they would have a foreign passport or steal across the border, whether they would have new dresses to travel in, and whether they could get koscher food on the ship. They advised her to make a pilgrimage to a "Good Jew," such as the Rebbe of Lubavitch, to get a blessing on the journey, and to pack her prayer books, Bible, and at least twenty pounds of zwieback, warning that if the ship served trefah she and the four children would have to starve unless she carried provisions from home.

Americanization and the Loss of a Name

The emigration brought a profound transformation of identity, beginning with the shedding of her name. A committee of friends, several years ahead of the family in American experience, put their heads together and concocted American names for them all. Those real names that had no pleasing American equivalents were ruthlessly discarded, content if they retained the initials. Hannah Hayye, possessing a name that was not easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of Annie. This loss of her honored name, "Raphael's Hannah Hayye," marked the erasure of her Old World identity and her reduction to a generic American nickname, a symbolic diminishment that paralleled her loss of status as a respected businesswoman.

In America, Hannah Hayye—now Annie—threw all her talent and tact into the family business. In Chelsea, the family settled on Arlington Street, inhabited by poor Jews, poor Negroes, and a sprinkling of poor Irish, where her husband rented a tenement with a store in the basement. Though she had no English yet, she could perform the acts of weighing, measuring, and mental computation of fractions mechanically, allowing her to give her whole attention to the dark mysteries of the language as she interacted with customers. She made such rapid progress that she soon lost all sense of disadvantage and conducted herself behind the counter very much as if she were back in her old store in Polotzk. Behind the store was the kitchen, where, in the intervals of slack trade, she did her cooking and washing, and Arlington Street customers were used to waiting while the storekeeper salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven.

The Sacrifice of Frieda and the Generational Divide

Hannah Hayye's story is also one of maternal sacrifice, particularly in the fate of her eldest daughter Frieda. Before the family had been two years in America, Frieda was engaged to be married, under what the narrator calls 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 she might have dodged her circumstances and evaded her Old-World fate, going to school and imbibing American ideas instead of marrying at seventeen. The narrator reflects that it seemed a pitiful accident that her sister should have come so near and missed by so little the fulfilment of America's promise to women. The decision was made by the father, too recently from the Old World to be entirely free from its social traditions, who put Frieda to work out of necessity and then, when the necessity was hardly lifted and she had an offer of marriage from a good workman of irreproachable character, would not stand in the way of what he considered her welfare. The act was really in the nature of a sacrifice on the father's part, for he was still in the woods financially and would sorely miss Frieda's wages. The narrator laments that there was no one to counsel him to give America more time with her sister, who attended night school and was fond of reading, and who might have found in books and a slowly ripening experience a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a premature marriage.

The Mother as Maker and Made

Hannah Hayye's role in the memoir extends beyond her own story to the very structure of the narrator's identity. Mary Antin writes that her parents gave her body, so that she has eyes like her father's and hair like her mother's, and that the spirit also they gave her, so that she reasons like her father and endures like her mother. Yet the narrator also claims a reciprocal creation: when she discovered her own friends and ran home with them to convert her parents to a belief in their excellence, she began to make her father and mother as truly as they had ever made her, becoming the parent and they the children in those relations of teacher and learner. Hannah Hayye, who endured like a mother and who was made over in America from a respected matriarch into an "Annie," thus embodies both the Old World values that shaped her daughter and the transformation that the New World demanded. Her journey from the solid position of Polotzk, through the heroine's farewell, to the kitchen behind the Arlington Street store, and finally to the undignified nickname, is the story of a woman who gave everything to her family's future and was remade by the very forces she helped set in motion.