Mr. Rosenblum

Mr. Rosenblum is the grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplies the Antin family's table during their years of poverty in Boston's South End. He appears in Mary Antin's memoir The Promised Land as a figure of extraordinary patience and generosity, conducting his business on the same perilous credit system that had driven Mary's father out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street. He supplies the family with tea and sugar and strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and bananas done to a turn — 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 knows the financial situation of every family that trades with him, from the gossip of his customers around his herring barrel, and he knows without asking that Mary's father has no regular employment and that it is consequently risky to give them credit. Nevertheless, he gives them credit by the week, by the month, accepts partial payment with thanks, and lets the balance stand by the year. The family owes him as much as they owe the landlady, Mrs. Hutch, every time he balances their account, yet he never complains; he even insists on Mary's mother taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays.

The Grocer as Benefactor

Mr. Rosenblum's role in the Antin family's life goes far beyond the provision of food. He knows, as well as Mrs. Hutch, that Mary's father keeps a daughter at school who is of age to be put to work, but so far is he from reproaching him for it that he detains Mary's father by the half-hour, inquiring about Mary's progress and discussing her future. He knows very well who it is that burns so much oil in the family, but when Mary comes in to have her kerosene can filled, he does not fall upon her with harsh words of blame. Instead, he wants to hear about her latest triumph at school and about the great people who write her letters and even come to see her, and he calls his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. When Mary makes some shame-faced reference to the unpaid balance, Mr. Rosenblum replies, "I guess you're not thinking of running away from Boston yet. You haven't finished turning the libraries inside out, have you?" In this way he reminds her that there are things more important than conventional respectability. The world belongs to those who can use it to the best advantage, the grocer seems to argue, and Mary finds that she has the courage to test this philosophy.

The Philosophy of Education

Mr. Rosenblum is himself an immigrant Jew of the type that values education and sets a great price on the higher development of the child. He would have done in Mary's father's place just what Mary's father is doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in debt — anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was, but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry. To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre present for the sake of the opulent future. If there was but one child in a family of twelve who promised to achieve an intellectual career, the other eleven, and father, and mother, and neighbors must devote themselves to that one child's welfare, and feed and clothe and cheer it on, and be rewarded in the end by hearing its name mentioned with the names of the great. This philosophy is dramatized in a conversation between Mr. Rosenblum and his own daughter Goldie. When Goldie protests that she does not understand her lessons, her father tells her that if she would put her mind on it and study hard, like Mary Antin, she would also stand high, and she would go to high school, and be somebody. "Sure as I am a Jew," he promptly replies to her question about whether he would really send her, a look of aspiration in his deep eyes. "Only show yourself worthy, Goldie, and I'll keep you in school till you get to something. In America everybody can get to something, if he only wants to. I would even send you farther than high school — to be a teacher, maybe. Why not? In America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie, like Mary Antin — study hard, put your mind on it." Goldie, however, is a restless little thing who cannot sit long over her geography book; she wriggles out of her mother's grasp and makes for the door, throwing a back-hand as she goes without losing a single jackstone. "I hate long lessons," she says. "When I graduate grammar school next year I'm going to work in Jordan-Marsh's big store, and get three dollars a week, and have lots of fun with the girls. I can't write pieces in the paper, anyhow." She leaves her ambitious parents to shake their heads over her flightiness.

The Symbol of Immigrant Values

Mr. Rosenblum's significance in the memoir is established through contrast. He is set against Mrs. Hutch, the landlady whose heart is set on direct, immediate, convertible cash payment and who remains obstinately deaf to Mary's plea for time. The grocer could have taught her to take a more liberal view, Mary notes, if she only would have listened. He is also contrasted with the abstract institutions of America that Mary celebrates elsewhere in the book — the public school, the free library, the lecture hall — for he represents the private, personal generosity that makes those institutions accessible to the poor. Mary explicitly offers him as evidence of the true values of her adopted country: "So the poor grocer helped to keep me in school for I do not know how many years. And this is one of the things that is done on Harrison Avenue, by the people who pitch rubbish through their windows. Let the City Fathers strike the balance." She acknowledges that this is wretched economics, and that if she had a son who wanted to go into the grocery business, she should take care that he was well grounded in the principles of sound bookkeeping and prudence. But she should not fail to tell him the story of the Harrison Avenue grocer, hoping that he would puzzle out the moral.

The Measure of a Man

Mr. Rosenblum himself would be astonished to hear that any one was drawing morals from his manner of conducting his little store, and yet it is from men like him that Mary says she learns the true values of things. The grocer weighs her out a quarter of a pound of butter, and when the scales are even he throws in another scrap. "Na!" he says, smiling across the counter, "you can carry that much around the corner!" Plainly he is showing her that if she has not as many houses as her neighbor, that should not prevent her from cultivating as many graces. He is a poor man, and has a large family, and many customers who pay as irregularly as the Antins. He runs the risk of ruin, of course, but he does not scold — not them, at any rate. For he understands. His generosity is not merely economic; it is a form of moral instruction, a living demonstration that the world belongs to those who can use it to the best advantage. In the larger arc of Mary Antin's narrative — from her first day at public school, which she calls the apex of her civic pride and personal contentment, to her account of how the public school made her into a good American — Mr. Rosenblum occupies a crucial place. He is one of the "ready teachers" who pass the immigrant child from hand to hand, and his lesson is that the promise of America must be grasped and held and squeezed dry. He is, in the end, part of the heritage Mary claims for herself: the proof that the American dream is sustained not only by institutions but by the quiet, unrecorded generosity of ordinary men.