Next Year in Jerusalem

Next Year in Jerusalem is the traditional closing aspiration of the Passover service, the Hebrew formula by which the Jewish people voice their hope of return to the ancient homeland. In Mary Antin's memoir the phrase appears in its familiar liturgical form, but its meaning is decisively overturned. At the end of the long service in Polotzk, the worshipers do not say "May we be next year in Jerusalem" as a prayer for the Holy Land; they say "Next year—in America!" The substitution is the book's central act of redefinition: the ancient hope of restoration is transferred from Jerusalem to the United States, and the westward emigration becomes the new Exodus, a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought. The phrase thus stands as the emblem of the entire immigrant transformation the memoir records, the moment when a people without a country discovers its promised land across the Atlantic.

The Liturgical Origin and Its Overturning

In the Polotzk of Mary's childhood, the Passover service closed with the words "Next year, may we be in Jerusalem." On childish lips these words carried no conscious aspiration; the children repeated the Hebrew syllables after their elders without the adults' hope and longing. Yet even the youngest child felt in his own flesh the lash of the oppressor, and knew from the spiteful treatment suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin who crossed himself that Israel had good reason to pray for deliverance. The story of the Exodus was not history to the children in the sense that the story of the American Revolution would later become; it was more like a glorious myth, a belief that cut them off from the actual world by linking them with a world of phantoms. The moments of exaltation that the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded, allowing them to call themselves the children of princes, served only to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of their life. In very truth they were a people without a country, surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, and it was difficult to realize the persons of their people's heroes or the events in which they moved. Except in moments of abstraction from the world around them, they scarcely understood that Jerusalem was an actual spot on the earth where once the Kings of the Bible, real people like their neighbors in Polotzk, ruled in puissant majesty.

The conditions of their civil life did not permit them to cultivate a spirit of nationalism. The freedom of worship grudgingly granted within the narrow limits of the Pale by no means included the right to set up openly any ideal of a Hebrew State, any hero other than the Czar. What the children picked up of their ancient political history was confused with the miraculous story of the Creation, with the supernatural legends and hazy associations of Bible lore. As to their future, the Jews in Polotzk had no national expectations; only a life-worn dreamer here and there hoped to die in Palestine. If Fetchke and Mary sang with their father, first making sure of their audience, "Zion, Zion, Holy Zion, not forever is it lost," they did not really picture to themselves Judaea restored. The liturgical hope was thus a hollow form, repeated without belief in its object, until the westward movement gave it a new and concrete referent.

The Transformation into an American Hope

When the open cities of Russia became suddenly crowded after the expulsion of Jews from Moscow, every man's chance of making a living diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, and ruin for many spread the disaster ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution. Passover was celebrated in tears that year; in the story of the Exodus they would have read a chapter of current history, only for them there was no deliverer and no promised land. But at the end of the long service, some of them said not "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year—in America!" So there was their promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West. And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought.

Mary's father was carried away by the westward movement, glad of his own deliverance but sore at heart for those he left behind. It was the last chance for all of them; they were so far reduced in circumstances that he had to travel with borrowed money to a German port, whence he was forwarded to Boston, with a host of others, at the expense of an emigrant aid society. Mary was about ten years old when her father emigrated. She was used to his going away from home, and "America" did not mean much more to her than "Kherson," or "Odessa," or any other names of distant places. She understood vaguely, from the gravity with which his plans were discussed, and from references to ships, societies, and other unfamiliar things, that this enterprise was different from previous ones; but her excitement and emotion on the morning of her father's departure were mainly vicarious. The phrase "Next year—in America!" thus marked the beginning of a process that would transform the abstract name of a distant place into the actual ground of a new life.

The Realization of the Promise in America

The promise contained in the transformed phrase was realized in a series of concrete American experiences that Mary records with the same vividness she brings to the liturgical formula. The first meal in the new home 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." There were five of them, and they found five different ways of getting into the American machine of perpetual motion, and as many ways of getting out of it. They laughed immoderately over their various experiments with the novelty, which was a wholesome way of letting off steam after the unusual excitement of the day. In the evening of the first day their father conducted them to the public baths, and as they moved along in a little procession Mary was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, her father said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns. In America, then, everything was free, as they had heard in Russia: light was free, the streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day; music was free, for they had been serenaded, to their gaping delight, by a brass band of many pieces soon after their installation on Union Place.

The promise also took on a civic and legal meaning. When a great, hulky colored boy who was the torment of the neighborhood treated Mary roughly while she was playing on the street, her father, determined to teach the rascal a lesson for once, had him arrested and brought to court. The boy was locked up overnight, and he emerged from his brief imprisonment with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. But what interested Mary more than her revenge on a bully was what she saw of the way in which justice was actually administered in the United States. There they were gathered in the little courtroom, bearded Arlington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street; accused and accuser, witnesses, sympathizers, sight-seers, and all. Nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to. They were all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution. The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. "Liberty and justice for all," she concluded, with three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue. The courtroom scene was the legal fulfillment of the promise that had been spoken at the Passover table in Polotzk.

The promise was further realized in the family's successive homes. When 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, there was a charming simplicity about these proceedings. Here to-day, apparently rooted; there to-morrow, and just as much at home. Another basement grocery, with a freshly painted sign over the door; the broom in the corner, the loaf on the table—these things made home for them. There were rather more Negroes on Wheeler Street, in the lower South End of Boston, than there had been on Arlington Street, which promised more numerous outstanding accounts; but they were a neighborly folk, and they took the strangers in—sometimes very badly. Then there was the school three blocks away, where "America" was sung to the same tune as in Chelsea, and geography was made as dark a mystery. It was impossible not to feel at home. The Wheeler Street neighborhood was not a place where a refined young lady would care to find herself alone, even in the cheery daylight; if she came at all, she would be attended by a trusty escort. She would not get too close to people on the doorsteps, and she would shrink away in disgust and fear from a blear-eyed creature careering down the sidewalk on many-jointed legs. The delicate damsel would hasten home to wash and purify and perfume herself till the foul contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated. Mary did not blame her, but only wished that she would bring a little soap and water and perfumery into Wheeler Street next time she came; for some people there may be smothering in the filth which they abhor as much as she, but from which they cannot, like her, run away.

The Phrase as a Measure of Transformation

The phrase "Next Year in Jerusalem" and its American replacement serve throughout the memoir as a measure of how completely the old sacred geography has been superseded. The liturgical hope that was once a hollow form, repeated without belief in its object, becomes in America a living civic faith. The transformation is registered in the very texture of Mary's American experiences, from the first meal of canned food and the rocking-chair experiments to the courtroom where justice was administered equally and the streets that burned with free light until morning. The promise of the promised land is kept not in Jerusalem but in the schools, the courts, and the lamp-lit streets of Boston and Chelsea.

The phrase also carries an ironic undertone, for the America that fulfills the promise is itself a place of harsh contrasts. The same memoir that records the courtroom triumph and the free illumination of the streets also records the filth of Wheeler Street and the rubbish heap of damaged humanity on Dover Street, where Harrison Avenue forms the heart of the South End ghetto. The promise is kept, but its keeping is imperfect; the promised land contains its own slums, its own neglected bodies pitched into the gutter while the City Fathers cleanse and discipline the children's minds. The phrase thus holds in tension the glory of the deliverance and the incompleteness of the redemption, the miracle of the Atlantic crossing and the ongoing struggle of the streets. It is the emblem of a hope that was spoken in exile and fulfilled in a new exile, a Jerusalem that is not a city but a process of becoming American.