Manna

Manna is the governing metaphor of Mary Antin's memoir The Promised Land, a concept that fuses the biblical food of the Exodus with the remembered flavors of a Polotzk childhood and the hunger of an immigrant for a new life. The term titles the fourteenth chapter of the book, where it marks a turning point in the family's American journey, and it recurs throughout the narrative as a figure for the way memory can restore what time and distance have taken away. For Antin, manna is not merely a substance but a principle: the past, like the desert food, can be tasted again, and the immigrant's craving for wisdom is fed by the very act of recollection. The concept gathers the book's most vivid scenes—Sabbath cheese cakes, cherry-stone contests, the first American meal, the eating of ham—into a single meditation on loss and preservation, on what dies with emigration and what survives in the senses.

The Biblical Root and the Chapter Title

The concept draws its name from the food that sustained the Israelites in the wilderness, and Antin invokes it explicitly when she titles the fourteenth chapter of her memoir "Manna." The chapter opens at a moment of transition: after a year or so in Chelsea, her father, finding a discrepancy between his assets and liabilities on the wrong side of the ledger, once more struck tent, collected his flock, and set out in search of richer pastures. The phrase "struck tent" is itself a desert echo, linking the family's restless movement to the wandering of the biblical Israelites. The chapter title thus signals that the family's American journey is to be read as a new Exodus, with the father as a Moses figure leading his people toward a promised land. The manna of the title, however, is not the food of the wilderness but the food of memory—the flavors of Polotzk that the family carries with them and that Antin will spend the rest of the book trying to recover.

The Flavors of Polotzk and the Aladdin's Lamp of Memory

Antin's most extended meditation on manna comes in her account of the Sabbath cheese cakes of Polotzk, which she ranks among the liveliest of her memories. She declares that she would sooner give up some of her delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than lose her images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. The cheese cake, she insists, cannot be reproduced by any cook, however clever, because its flavor depends on history rather than recipe. To taste it properly, one must first eat it as a ravenous child in memorable twilights before the lighting of the week-day lamp; then one must be removed across the oceans to a land where the pastry is unknown even by name; and one must abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years—fifteen, she thinks, is the magic number—before rubbing the Aladdin's lamp of memory and having the tidbit whisked upon the platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association. The flavor of the cake, she writes, contains the daisies and clover of the Vall, the sweetness of Dvina water, the richness of newly turned earth, the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place, the fragrance of all her childhood's summers. Abstinence, she concludes, is one of the essential ingredients in the phantom dish.

The Cherry-Stone Contest and the Failure of Reproduction

The manna principle is tested in Antin's account of a cherry season in Polotzk, when her Cousin Shimke, a storekeeper like everybody else, set a boy to watch her store and Antin to watch the boy while she went home to make cherry preserves. For their trouble they were given a basket of cherries, and the boy offered to eat them with the stones if Antin would give him her share. She was equal to that feat herself, so they sat down to a cherry-stone contest. Years later, standing under laden trees in the American countryside, Antin could not remember who ate the most stones, but the transcendent flavor of the historical cherries came back to her, and she needs must enjoy it once more. She climbed into the lowest boughs and hung there, eating cherries with the stones, her whole mind concentrated on the sense of taste. Alas, the fruit had no such flavor to yield as she sought. Excellent American cherries these were, but not so fragrantly sweet as her cousin's cherries. She reflects that if she should return to Polotzk and buy a measure of cherries at a market stall, paying with a Russian groschen, the market woman would not be generous enough to throw in that haunting flavor; she fears the old species of cherry is extinct in Polotzk. The episode establishes the central paradox of manna: it cannot be manufactured, only remembered.

The Strawberry Vision and the Compression of a Lifetime

The most powerful instance of manna comes when Antin is not trying to remember at all. Eating ripe, red American strawberries one day, she suddenly experienced the very flavor and aroma of some strawberries she ate perhaps twenty years ago. She started as from a shock, and then sat still for she does not know how long, breathless with amazement. In the brief interval of a gustatory perception she became a child again, positively aching with the pain of being so suddenly compressed to that small being. She wandered about Polotzk once more with large, questioning eyes; she rode the Atlantic in an emigrant ship; she took possession of the New World, her ears growing accustomed to a new language; she sat at the feet of renowned professors, till her eyes contracted in dreaming over what they taught; and there she was again, an American among Americans, suddenly made aware of all that she had been, all that she had become—suddenly illuminated, inspired by a complete vision of herself, a daughter of Israel and a child of the universe, that taught her more of the history of her race than ever her learned teachers could understand. All this came to her in that instant of tasting, all from the flavor of ripe strawberries on her tongue. The experience gives her a great respect for her bread and meat; she wants to taste of as many viands as possible, for when she sits down to a dish of porridge she is certain of rising again a better animal, and she may rise a wiser man. She expects some day to extract from her pudding the flavor of manna which she ate in the desert, and then she shall write a contemporaneous commentary on the Exodus. Nor does she despair of remembering yet, over a dish of corn, the time when she fed on worms, and then she may be able to recall how it felt to be made at last into a man. Give her to eat and drink, for she craves wisdom.

Manna and the American Table

The manna concept also illuminates the new American foods that replace the old, and the mixed feelings they inspire. The first meal in the Union Place flat was an object lesson of much variety: her father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them. He attempted to introduce the newcomers to a queer, slippery kind of fruit which he called "banana," but had to give it up for the time being. After the meal he had better luck with a curious piece of furniture on runners, which he called "rocking-chair." The five newcomers found five different ways of getting into the American machine of perpetual motion, and as many ways of getting out of it, laughing immoderately over their experiments. The tin cans and the banana are the anti-manna of the New World: food without history, without the flavor of daisies and clover, yet carrying their own kind of wonder. The contrast is sharpened by the ham at Miss Dillingham's tea, where Antin, the self-declared liberal and freethinker, found herself afraid to touch the forbidden food. She helped herself to a slice nevertheless, hung her head over her plate to hide her confusion, and began to reduce the ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. She learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk; she ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of herself. The ham is manna inverted—a food that must be eaten to prove a point, that carries no sweetness of association but only the weight of transgression. Yet even here the manna principle holds: the eating of ham becomes another test, another flavor that will be remembered and digested into the self.

The Grocer's Credit and the Sustenance of the Poor

The manna metaphor extends beyond the narrator's own palate to the economic sustenance of the immigrant family. Mr. Rosenblum, the grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplied the family's table, conducted his business on the same perilous credit system which had driven Antin's father out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street. He supplied tea and sugar and strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and bananas done to a turn—with everything, in short, that keeps a poor man's family hearty in spite of what they eat—all for the consideration of part payment, with the faintest prospect of a future settlement in full. He knew without asking that Antin's father had no regular employment, and that it was consequently risky to give credit; nevertheless he gave credit by the week, by the month, accepted partial payment with thanks, and let the balance stand by the year. He even insisted on Antin's mother taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays. When Antin came in to have her kerosene can filled, he did not fall upon her with harsh words of blame; instead he wanted to hear about her latest triumph at school, and about the great people who wrote her letters and even came to see her, and he called his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who could not sign her name, came out in her faded calico wrapper, and stood with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before the embryo scholar, nodding her head sideways in approval, drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of the tale. If her black-eyed Goldie happened to be playing jackstones on the curb, Mrs. Rosenblum pulled her into the store to hear what distinction Mr. Antin's daughter had won at school, bidding her take example from Mary, if she would also go far in education. The grocer's credit is a secular manna—food given without immediate payment, sustained by faith in a future settlement, and seasoned with the flavor of hope and communal pride.