Moscow

In Mary Antin's memoir of her journey from the Pale of Settlement to American citizenship, Moscow functions as the ultimate emblem of the Czar's arbitrary and oppressive rule over the Jews. It is a place of paradox: a great and important city that her father, her uncle, or her neighbor must never enter, no matter what urgent business might invite them there. The police would seize them and send them back to Polotzk, like wicked criminals, although they had never done any wrong. This prohibition was not merely a personal inconvenience but a defining feature of the Jewish condition in Russia, a constant reminder that the world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and that the former were prisoners within a designated area.

The Forbidden City

Moscow was one of the specific places—along with St. Petersburg and Kiev—where Jews were absolutely forbidden to reside, even illegally. The memoir explains that the Czar and the police seemed to want all Russia for themselves, a vast country where it took many days for a letter to reach one's father. The prohibition was enforced with brutal efficiency: people from Polotzk who attempted to travel to these cities were sometimes turned back before they had finished their business, and often they were cruelly treated on the way. The injustice was compounded by the fact that even Jews who had their homes in Moscow and had no other place to go were driven out, arriving in Polotzk as refugees with stories of cruel treatment, where they were taken in and helped despite being strangers. This expulsion of established residents seemed utterly inexplicable to the young Mary, who wondered why everybody might not be allowed to live where they wanted in such a large country.

The Threat of Expulsion

The menace of Moscow was not a distant abstraction but a recurring, lived catastrophe. The memoir records one such disaster that struck just before Passover, when the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district was announced at cruelly short notice. The cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with familiar fear, and the question on everyone's lips was where the doom would strike next. Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight, while those in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. Hundreds of fugitives, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open districts, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent. The sudden crowding of the open cities diminished every man's chance of making a living, spreading hardship, acute distress, and ruin ring beyond ring, like the ripples from a stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution. That year, Passover was celebrated in tears, for in the story of the Exodus the people read a chapter of current history, only for them there was no deliverer and no promised land.

The Broader System of Oppression

Moscow's exclusion of Jews was part of a larger system of legal and economic oppression that defined life in the Pale of Settlement. The Czar commanded the Jews to stay within the designated area, which included Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places, and they must not be found outside it because they were Jews. This knowledge trickled into Mary's consciousness drop by drop, so that by the time she fully understood she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The system extended to military conscription, where Jewish recruits were likely to be treated with severity and were forced to break the Jewish laws of daily life, eating trefah, working on Sabbath, and shaving their beards. Men of twenty-one, often already married with children, faced the ruin of their families and businesses during their four years of service, returning as beggars, stripped of their good uniforms and hurried back into the Pale like escaped prisoners. The Czar's dues were collected with relentless cruelty, as illustrated by the poor locksmith who owed three hundred rubles because his brother had escaped conscription—a fine that applied only to Jews—and whose household goods, including his young bride's trousseau, were attached and sold for a fraction of the debt. The system of taxation was equally oppressive, with taxes on houses, rents, business, and profits, and special levies for public works that never materialized, while a railroad bridge across the Dvina, open to the military, could be used by the people only by individual permission.

The Contrast with America

The meaning of Moscow in the memoir is sharpened by its direct contrast with America, where the same family found freedom. Mary's father, who could never legally enter Moscow, applied for naturalization almost as his first act on landing on American soil, three years before he conducted his children to school. He took the remaining steps with eager promptness and became a citizen at the earliest moment allowed by the law. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, and to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. This contrast is dramatized in the schoolyard, where Mary, defending her right to hold any kind of God she chose, reminded her tormentors that this was a free country and that the persecution she faced was contrary to the Constitution of the United States. It is further dramatized in the courtroom, where a great, hulky colored boy who had treated her roughly was arrested and brought to justice. In the little courtroom, nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to; all were free and treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution, and the evil-doer was actually punished, not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. The lesson of Moscow, where the police seized Jews and sent them back like criminals, is answered by the American scene where justice was administered impartially, prompting Mary's exclamation of "Liberty and justice for all."

A Symbol of the Old World

Moscow ultimately stands as the representative of the Old World's tyranny, the place that embodies everything the Antin family fled. It is the forbidden city that could not be entered, the source of expulsion orders that ruined lives, and the seat of a power that treated Jews as prisoners in their own land. The memoir's geography is thus moral: Moscow and the Pale represent the past's oppression, while Boston, with its schools, libraries, and courts, represents the future's promise. Even as Mary's family moved through the slums of the South End, settling on Wheeler Street and later near Harrison Avenue, the contrast with Moscow remained implicit—the filth and poverty of the American ghetto were real, but they were not enforced by law, and the children's minds were cleansed and disciplined by excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries. The journey from the forbidden city to the promised land is the arc of the memoir, and Moscow is the fixed point of darkness against which the light of America is measured.