Pinchus Antin's emigration to America

Pinchus Antin's emigration to America is the hinge on which the entire memoir of Mary Antin turns. It is the event that converts the abstract dream of a promised land into a concrete family project, and it is the precondition for everything that follows: the family's arrival in Boston, Mary's first day at public school, her discovery of the public library, and her emergence as a writer. The departure is not merely a change of address but a rupture with the world of the Pale of Settlement, a world defined by the Czar's decree that Jews must remain within a confined area, and a world where the father's business failures had reduced the family to helpless poverty. The emigration is thus both an escape and a wager, a gamble that a new soil can yield a new life.

Causes and Background

The decision to emigrate grows directly out of a long series of troubles that had reduced the Antin family to a state of helpless poverty. After a number of peaceful years of comfort and contentment following the father's return from "far Russia," a period of illness and misfortune set in. Pinchus became seriously ill and spent large sums on cures that did not cure him; while he was still an invalid, his wife also became ill and kept her bed for the better part of two years; some of the children fell ill as well, so that at one period the house was a hospital. While the parents were incapacitated, the business was ruined through bad management, until a day came when there was not enough money in the cash drawer to pay the doctor's bills. For some years after they got upon their feet again, the parents struggled to regain their place in the business world, but failed to do so. The father had another period of experimenting with this or that business, but everything went wrong, till at last he made a great resolve to begin life all over again, and the way to do that was to start on a new soil. The emigration was also a response to the larger condition of Jewish life in Russia, where the Czar commanded Jews to stay within the Pale of Settlement, a fence around Polotzk that divided the world into Jews and Gentiles. The burden of military service, which could ruin a family and force men to violate Jewish law, and the bewildering array of taxes on houses, rents, business, and profits, all contributed to a sense of hopelessness that made the idea of America a compelling alternative.

The Departure and the Father's Vision

The 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. The family was 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 his departure were mainly vicarious. The day when "America" as a world entirely unlike Polotzk lodged in her brain came later, when she was in bed sharing the measles with some of the other children. Mother brought them a thick letter from father, written just before boarding the ship. The letter was full of excitement, with descriptions of travel, pictures of crowds of people, of foreign cities, of a ship ready to put out to sea. The father was travelling at the expense of a charitable organization, without means of his own, without plans, to a strange world where he had no friends, and yet he wrote with the confidence of a well-equipped soldier going into battle. He simply wrote that the emigration committee was taking good care of everybody, that the weather was fine, and the ship comfortable, but Mary heard something more than the words seemed to say. There was an elation, a hint of triumph, such as had never been in her father's letters before. She felt a stirring, a straining in the letter, and she knew that her father was inspired by a vision. He saw something, he promised them something, and it was this "America." And "America" became her dream.

The Heroine of Polotzk and the Community's Response

The arrival of the steamer ticket transformed the family's departure into a public event. On the day the ticket arrived, the mother did not go out with her basket, the brother stayed out of heder, and the sister salted the soup three times. Before sunset the news was all over Polotzk that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America. Then they began to come: friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors, from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere, a steady stream of them poured into the street, both day and night, till the hour of departure. The mother gave audience, her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, receiving her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk, and she conducted herself appropriately, giving her heart's thanks for the congratulations and blessings, ready tears for condolences, patient answers to monotonous questions, and handshakes and kisses and hugs gratis. The eager, foolish, friendly people asked endless questions: they wanted to handle the ticket, and mother must read them what is written on it; how much did it cost; was it all paid for; were they going to have a foreign passport or did they intend to steal across the border; were they not all going to have new dresses to travel in; was it sure that they could get koscher food on the ship. With the questions poured in suggestions and solid chunks of advice: mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a "Good Jew" to get his blessing on their journey; she must be sure and pack her prayer books and Bible, and twenty pounds of zwieback at the least; if they did serve trefah on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried provisions from home; and she must take all the featherbeds, for featherbeds are scarce in America.

The Father's Americanization and the Investment in Children

Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before the family's arrival, had been his application for naturalization. He had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United States. It is true that he had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to America. 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, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only a young man when he landed, thirty-two, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was hungry for his untasted manhood. Three years passed in sordid struggle and disappointment, as he was not prepared to make a living even in America. He had been endowed at birth with a poor constitution, a nervous, restless temperament, and an abundance of hindering prejudices; in his boyhood his body was starved, that his mind might be stuffed with useless learning; in his youth this dearly gotten learning was sold, and the price was the bread and salt which he had not been trained to earn for himself. In his primary quest he had failed, but there was left him the compensation of intellectual freedom, which he sought to realize in every possible way, though he never learned to write correctly and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day. If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them: he could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company, and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that he led his children to school on that first day, taking long strides in his eagerness, the rest of them running and hopping to keep up.

Consequences and Aftermath

The emigration set in motion a chain of transformations that define the rest of the memoir. Mary's first day at public school became the apex of her civic pride and personal contentment, an event she says she must always remember, even if she lives to be so old that she cannot tell her name. The importance of the day was a hundred times magnified on account of the years she had waited, the road she had come, and the conscious ambitions she entertained. The father's investment in his children's education bore fruit in Mary's promotion to grammar school, where she walked on air, feeling herself a student now, in earnest, learning out-of-the-way things, things that had nothing to do with ordinary life. She carried home half the books in her desk, not because she needed them, but because she loved to hold them, and because she loved to be seen carrying books, as a badge of scholarship. The emigration also led to Mary's discovery of the Boston Public Library, which she called her palace, hers because she was a citizen, though she was born an alien, though she lived on Dover Street. She loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out, and to remind herself that she was there, that she had a right to be there, that she was at home there. The community of immigrants that the father joined also sustained the family's ambitions: Mr. Rosenblum, a poor grocer on Harrison Avenue, gave Mary oil for her lamp and helped to keep her in school for years, understanding that to keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre present for the sake of the opulent future. The emigration thus created not only a new life for the Antins but a new kind of social world, one in which the education of a promising child was a collective project, and in which the father's dream of walking by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning was realized through his daughter.