Letter to Uncle Moses

The Letter to Uncle Moses is the long Yiddish epistle that Mary Antin wrote during her first months in America, recounting the family's emigration from Polotzk to Boston. It is a pivotal document in The Promised Land because it preserves the voyage in the narrator's own childish voice, survives a kerosene-lamp accident, and later becomes the raw material for the memoir's most vivid chapters. The letter is both a private family record and a literary artifact, one that the adult narrator retrieves, translates, and folds into her own story, making it a rare instance in the book where the reader hears the child's contemporaneous account rather than the woman's retrospective one.

Origin and Purpose

The letter was born of a promise. During the family's farewell visit in Vilna, where Mary's mother had a brother, Mary pledged to her uncle that she would write him a detailed account of their adventures between Polotzk and Boston. She kept that promise during her first months in America, composing the epistle in Yiddish over many hot summer hours. Ink was cheap, and the writing absorbed her for a long stretch of time, the thick pile of letter sheets growing as she recorded every stage of the journey. The letter was thus from the start a transnational document, a thread connecting the old world and the new, carrying news of the family's fate back to the relatives left behind in Russia.

The circumstances of its composition were humble and domestic. Mary wrote in the cramped quarters of the family's new American home, surrounded by the bustle of a household that included her parents, her siblings, the store, the baby, and sometimes a "greener" or two from Polotzk whom the family lodged as a matter of course until they found a permanent home. The letter was not a polished literary exercise but a child's earnest report, written in the language of her childhood, to an uncle who spoke that same language. It was, in effect, a bridge between the two worlds she inhabited.

The Kerosene-Lamp Accident and Its Aftermath

The letter nearly did not survive. When Mary was near the end of her writing, a lamp was upset on her writing-table, soaking the thick pile of letter sheets in kerosene. It was a great disaster at the time, for she was obliged to make a fair copy for her uncle, laboriously rewriting the entire epistle. But the oily, smelly original was kept by her father, who preserved it through the years. After a couple of years of teasing, he induced Mary to translate the letter into English, for the benefit of a friend who did not know Yiddish. The translation was made thirteen years before the present narrative was even thought of, and it is this English version that the adult narrator turns to in The Promised Land.

The accident, which seemed at the time a calamity, became in retrospect a stroke of luck. The adult narrator, looking back at the leaves of her childish manuscript, can hardly refrain from moralizing, grateful at last for the overturned lamp. Without it, the letter might have been lost, and with it the child's own voice describing the voyage. The kerosene-soaked pages, preserved by her father, became the documentary foundation for the memoir's account of the emigration, allowing Mary to quote directly from her younger self rather than relying solely on memory.

The Letter's Account of the Voyage

The letter faithfully describes every stage of the family's progress, and the adult narrator reproduces long passages from it verbatim. The route lay over the German border, with Hamburg for the port. On the way to the frontier, the family stopped in Vilna, where Mary found special mention of only two things: the horse-cars and the bookstores. On a gray wet morning in early April, they set out for the frontier, and Mary's faculties of observation were fully alert. She took note of everything—the weather, the trains, the bustle of railroad stations, the fellow passengers, and the family mood at every stage of the journey.

The letter records the family's meager traveling outfit: bags and bundles much more bulky than valuable, a trifling sum of money, the steamer ticket, and the foreign passport. These were the magic agents by which they hoped to span the five thousand miles of earth and water between them and Mary's father. But the passport was not enough to guarantee safe passage. At Versbolovo, the last station on the Russian side, they met their first trouble. A German physician and several gendarmes boarded the train and put them through a searching examination as to their health, destination, and financial resources. As a result, they were informed that they would not be allowed to cross the frontier unless they exchanged their third-class steamer ticket for second-class, which would require two hundred rubles more than they possessed. Their passport was taken from them, and they were to be turned back.

The letter describes the situation with stark simplicity: "We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place. We had hardly money enough to last us through the voyage." The child's plain words carry the full weight of the family's desperation. Moved by their distress, the German officers gave them the best advice they could: they were to get out at the station of Kibart on the Russian side and apply to one Herr Schidorsky, who might help them on their way.

The Schidorsky Brothers and the Crossing

The letter dwells gratefully on the kindness of Herr Schidorsky, who became the agent of their salvation. He procured Mary's mother a pass to Eidtkuhnen, the German frontier station, where his older brother, as chairman of a well-known emigrant aid association, arranged for their admission into Germany. During the negotiations, which took several days, the good man of Kibart entertained the family in his own house, shabby emigrants though they were. The Schidorsky brothers were Jews, but the letter makes clear that it is not on that account that their name has been lovingly remembered for fifteen years in the family. It was their humanity, not their religion, that earned the family's enduring gratitude.

Mary's letter records even the least important particulars of Kibart with remarkable fidelity. She noticed and remembered how the porter—an ugly, grinning man—carried in their things, and she observed the details of the depot with the same intensity she brought to every new place. The letter notes a Russian translation below some text, and Mary remembered all of it, "as if there were nothing else in the world for me to think of." This obsessive attention to detail, preserved in the letter, becomes a hallmark of the memoir's account of the journey.

On the German side, the family's course joined that of many other emigrant groups on their way to Hamburg and other ports. The letter describes them as a clumsy enough crowd, with wide, unsophisticated eyes, awkward bundles hugged in their arms, and hearts set on America. One sample scene recorded in the letter captures the chaos of the journey: there was a terrible confusion in the baggage-room where they were directed to go, with boxes, baskets, bags, and valises piled everywhere. The letter faithfully describes every stage of this bustling progress, preserving the texture of the emigrant experience for the uncle who would never make the journey himself.

The Letter's Role in the Memoir

The Letter to Uncle Moses occupies a unique place in The Promised Land. It is the only extended passage in the book where the narrator steps aside and lets a contemporaneous document speak in her place. The adult narrator introduces the letter with the remark that "memory may take a rest while I copy from a contemporaneous document the story of the great voyage," signaling a deliberate shift in narrative authority. The letter is presented as raw evidence, unmediated by the retrospective wisdom of the older narrator, and its childish voice—with its plain statements, its precise observations, and its unvarnished emotions—carries a power that the adult's more polished prose cannot match.

The letter also serves as a testament to the family's survival. It was written in the new world, looking back at the ordeal of the journey, and it was sent to the old world, to an uncle who had stayed behind. In this sense, it is a transnational object, a message carried across the ocean that links the two halves of the family's life. The fact that Mary's father kept the kerosene-soaked original for years, and then persuaded her to translate it, suggests that the family recognized the letter's value as a record of their transformation. The letter is not merely a document of what happened; it is a proof of what they became.

In the larger structure of the memoir, the letter functions as a kind of time capsule. It preserves the child's voice at the moment of transition, before Americanization had reshaped her language and her identity. The Yiddish original, written in the first months in America, captures Mary at the threshold between two worlds, still thinking and writing in the language of Polotzk even as she describes her arrival in Boston. The English translation, made years later at her father's urging, marks the completion of that transition. The letter thus embodies the very process of transformation that The Promised Land describes: the child who wrote in Yiddish becomes the woman who translates her own words into English, and the reader witnesses both versions in the pages of the memoir.