Passover

Passover is the festival around which Mary Antin's memoir turns, the annual reenactment of the Jewish deliverance from Egypt that in her telling becomes the hinge between two worlds. In Polotzk it was the holiest and most intimate season of the Jewish year, a time when the house was made "clean and shining and holy, even in the corners where nobody ever looked," and when the everyday vessels were put away in the garret and special dishes brought out for the festival week. Mary helped unpack the new dishes and find her own blue mug; fresh curtains went up, the white floors were uncovered, everybody put on new clothes, and she sat down to the feast in her new dress, feeling "clean inside and out." The youngest child in the house knew how Passover was kept, and Mary, asking the Four Questions about the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs, was answered by her family reading from their books. It was a knowledge so complete and so bodily that the Gentile accusation against the festival struck her as a wicked lie that made her sick to think of.

The Blood Libel and the Shadow of the Pogrom

The Passover season, when the Jews celebrated their deliverance from the land of Egypt "and felt so glad and thankful, as if it had only just happened," was precisely the time the Gentile neighbors chose to remind them that Russia was another Egypt. The lie that Jews used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival would surface, the stupid peasants would get mad about it, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill the Jews with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, burning their houses in what was called a "pogrom." Jews who escaped came to Polotzk with wounds and horrible stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mothers' eyes; people who saw such things never smiled again, and some had their hair turn white in a day or went insane on the spot. Often the pogrom was led by a priest carrying a cross before the mob, and Mary, who never was in an actual pogrom but felt it threaten even in Polotzk, saw in all her fearful imaginings "the cross, the cruel cross." The festival of freedom was thus, in Russia, the season of terror, the time when the deliverance celebrated in the Haggadah had no counterpart in the present.

Passover in Tears and the Turn to America

The year of the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow, a little before Passover, the festival was celebrated in tears. In the story of the Exodus the Jews of Polotzk could have read a chapter of current history, "only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land." Yet at the end of the long service, some did not say "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year—in America!" So there was their promised land, and many faces 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, traveling with borrowed money to a German port whence he was forwarded to Boston at the expense of an emigrant aid society. The Passover wish itself had been rewritten: the ancient hope of Jerusalem was replaced by the new hope of America, and the festival's promise of deliverance was transferred from the Holy Land to the New World.

The First American Meal and the Loss of the Festival Table

The first meal in America was an object lesson in how completely the Passover table had been left behind. Mary's father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them, and attempted to introduce the newcomers to a queer, slippery kind of fruit he called "banana," but had to give it up for the time being. There was no seder, no special dishes unpacked from the garret, no Four Questions; the festival's domestic holiness had been replaced by the wonder of canned food and the comedy of the rocking-chair, which five newcomers found five different ways of getting into and out of. The memory of the Polotzk Passover, with its clean corners and its blue mug, became one of those remembered feasts whose flavor could not be reproduced: Mary reflects that the Polotzk cheese cake of her childhood had in it the flavor of daisies and clover picked on 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—and that her mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, had forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery, leaving Mary the richer in memories for her omissions. The festival's food, like the festival itself, survived only as memory.

The Ham at Miss Dillingham's Tea

The deepest transformation of Passover in America came at Miss Dillingham's tea table, where Mary, invited to her first meal at a Christian board, was passed a platter with a kind of meat strange to her. "Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham—forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it!" She had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, and self-contempt, but helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless, hanging her head over her plate to hide her confusion, furious with herself for her weakness—she who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought, afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh. She began to reduce the ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table, but learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk: she ate with a squirming, a protesting of the inner man, an exquisite abhorrence of herself that only a newly abnegated Jew could understand. The Passover prohibition, which had once defined the holiest week of the year, had become the symbol of everything she was leaving behind, and the eating of ham the test of her new freedom—a freedom that her own body, trained by the festival's discipline, still resisted. The festival's dietary law, which had made the Passover table holy, was now the very thing she had to transgress to become American.

The Festival's Afterlife in the Slums and Beyond

The Passover ideal of cleansing survived in strange forms in the American slums. On Harrison Avenue, the heart of the South End ghetto, even Passover could not quite cleanse the street: although the tenements might be scrubbed to their remotest corners, the cleansing stopped at the curbstone, and a great deal of the filthy rubbish accumulated in a year was pitched into the street, often through the windows, to be trampled to powder and steal back into the houses. The City Fathers provided soap and water for the slums in the form of excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries, but stopped at the curbstone of the people's life, cleansing and disciplining the children's minds while pitching their bodies into the gutter. The festival's promise of a clean and holy house had become a metaphor for what America offered and withheld. And yet the Passover spirit of deliverance found a new incarnation: the grocer Mr. Rosenblum, who gave the family credit by the week and by the month and let the balance stand by the year, insisted on Mary's mother taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays, and called his wife from the kitchen to hear of Mary's triumphs at school, bidding her black-eyed Goldie take example from Mary if she would also go far in education. The festival's insistence on freedom and new beginnings, once enacted in the Passover house of Polotzk, was now enacted in the American schoolroom and the immigrant's struggle for education—the new Exodus whose promised land was not Jerusalem but America itself.