Kimanye is a village in the Pale of Settlement, the vast region of the Russian Empire within which the Czar commanded Jews to remain, and it enters Mary Antin's memoir not as a place of geography but as the seat of a family's moral origin. It was from this village that Israel Kimanyer took his name, and it was the fame of his holy life, radiating from this obscure hamlet through a good part of the Pale, that gave the Antin family its most precious inheritance: the boast of direct descent from a man of piety. The village itself was poor to the verge of beggary, its people barely able to sustain themselves, yet it became the site of an act of collective devotion that Antin presents as the purest expression of the Judaism of the Pale.

The Zaddik of Kimanye

Israel Kimanyer, the author's great-grandfather, was a man whose knowledge of Hebrew sufficed only to teach beginners, yet his simple piety, unsupported by learning, raised him to a hero among the Hasidim, the sect of enthusiasts who set religious exaltation above rabbinical lore. He prayed more than other people, never failed in the slightest observance enjoined on Jews, shared his last crust with every chance beggar, and sat up nights to commune with God. His family connections included country peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells, but Israel was a zaddik, a man of piety, and the fame of his good life redeemed the whole wretched clan. People were proud to establish even the most distant relationship with him, and his reputation spread through a good part of the Pale, making the name of his village synonymous with holiness.

The House Built by Loving Hands

The little house that the pious Jews of Kimanye and the neighboring villages built for the great-grandfather may still be standing, close on a century after it was raised. Israel was too poor to build his own house, so the good people who loved him, and who were almost as poor as he, collected a few rubles among themselves, bought a site, and built the house with their own hands, for they were too poor to hire workmen. They carried the beams and boards on their shoulders, singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the presentation of a scroll to the synagogue. They hauled and sawed and hammered, till the last nail was driven home, and when they conducted the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the crowning of a czar. This cabin, Antin insists, was fit to be preserved as the monument to a species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale.

The Moral Foundation of the Family

When Israel's grandson, the author's father, came to marry, he boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer and picked his bride from the best families. The zaddik's fame thus functioned as a form of social capital that transcended the rigid caste system of the Pale, where the rich looked down on the poor and the merchants looked down on the artisans. In a society where only scholarship could raise a man above his social level, and where a boy stuffed with learning was worth more than a girl stuffed with bank notes, the inheritance of a holy ancestor provided an alternative claim to distinction. The family's connection to Kimanye and its zaddik became a moral foundation, a source of pride that the Antins carried with them when they left the Pale for America.

The Meaning of Kimanye in the Memoir

Kimanye stands in the memoir as the antithesis of the oppressive machinery of the Russian state that surrounded it. The same Pale that confined Jews to a fenced existence, that subjected them to ruinous taxes and the dread of military conscription, also produced this extraordinary flowering of communal piety. The village represents the inner world of the Jew, who, retiring within his own soul, heard the voice of the God of Abraham, and who identified himself with the cause of righteousness on earth. The house built for Israel Kimanyer was the physical embodiment of this conviction, a structure raised not by wealth or power but by love and faith, and it remained for Antin a touchstone of the spiritual resources that sustained her people through the trials of life in the Pale and that she carried with her into her new American life.