Kherson enters Mary Antin's memoir not as a place she ever visits, but as a name that carries the weight of a transformed Jewish world. It is one of the southern Russian cities where her father, Pinchus, discovered a new way of life during his travels, a world where Jews remained faithful to the essence of their religion while allowing themselves far more latitude in practice and observance than the people of Polotzk permitted. In these cities, instead of bribing government officials to relax the law of compulsory education for boys, the Jews pushed in numbers at every open door of culture and enlightenment. Most strikingly, even the girls were given books in Odessa and Kherson, as the rock to build their lives on, and not as an ornament for idleness. This single fact—that girls in Kherson were educated as a foundation for life rather than as a decorative accomplishment—marks the city as the seedbed of the very ideal that would eventually carry the Antin family to America.

The Father's Transformation and the New Ideal

Kherson is inseparable from the story of Pinchus's intellectual awakening. He had gone away from Polotzk as a man unfit for the life he led, out of harmony with his surroundings, at odds with his neighbors, never heartily devoted to the religious ideals of the Hebrew scholar, and increasingly a dissenter as he matured—yet hardly knowing what he wanted to embrace in place of the ideals he rejected. The rigid scheme of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale offered no opening to any other mode of life. But in the large cities in the east and south, including Kherson, he discovered a new world and found himself at home in it. His mind was ready for the reception of such ideas, and he was inspired by the new view of the world they afforded him. When he returned to Polotzk, he knew what had been wrong with his life before, and he proceeded to remedy it, resolving to live, as far as the conditions of existence in Polotzk permitted, the life of a modern man. He saw no better place to begin than with the education of his children, and education became for him the one means to redemption. His children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's children might even be free men.

Kherson as a Measure of the Pale's Confinement

The significance of Kherson is sharpened by its contrast with the world of the Pale of Settlement, the area that grouped Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places under the Czar's command that Jews must stay within, never to be found outside because they were Jews. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and this knowledge trickled into the young Mary'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. Kherson, lying outside this fence, represented the possibility of a different Jewish existence—one where the state's restrictions did not define the limits of intellectual life. The contrast is implicit but powerful: within the Pale, a girl was "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation, and if she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called well educated. In Kherson, girls were given books as the rock to build their lives on. The distance between these two worlds is the distance the family would ultimately cross by emigrating to America.

The Name in the Child's Geography

For the young Mary, before she understood the gravity of her father's plans, "America" did not mean much more to her than "Kherson," or "Odessa," or any other names of distant places. She was about ten years old when her father emigrated, and she was used to his going away from home; the names of far-off cities were interchangeable in her childish geography. Kherson thus functions in the narrative as a placeholder in the mental map of a child who has not yet learned to distinguish between the ordinary absences of a traveling father and the epochal departure that would change her life. Only later, when the letter from her father written just before boarding the ship lodged "America" in her brain as a world entirely unlike Polotzk, did the vague names of distant places crystallize into a single, consuming dream. Kherson remains in the background as the earlier, less charged instance of the same westward and southward pull that would eventually carry the family across the Atlantic.

The Unvisited Ideal and Its Legacy

Kherson is never visited in the memoir, and this is precisely its narrative function: it is an ideal rather than a destination, a proof that Jewish life could be otherwise, carried home by the father and planted in the education of his daughters. The ideal bore fruit in the Antin household, where Fetchke and Mary were started with a rebbe in the orthodox way but were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and had a secular teacher besides. Their mother, although she had not stirred out of Polotzk, readily adopted the notion of a liberal education imported by her husband from cities beyond the Pale, and heartily supported him in all his plans for the girls. They were to study Russian and German and arithmetic, and to go to the best pension and receive a thorough secular education. The father's ambition, after several years' sojourn in enlightened circles, reached even beyond the pension, though that was flying farther than Polotzk could follow him with the naked eye. Kherson, in this light, is the first link in a chain of aspiration that runs from the southern Russian city through the father's transformed consciousness, into the education of his daughters, and ultimately to the American public schools, the Latin School, and Barnard College. It is the unvisited place that made the visited ones possible, the distant city whose name, uttered in the same breath as Odessa, first taught a Jewish girl in the Pale that the world contained more than the fence around Polotzk.