Polota

Polota is the river most powerfully associated with Mary Antin’s childhood in Polotzk. It marks a route out of town, gathers relatives and neighbors into seasonal recreation, and becomes the scene of a formative encounter with nature in which the child feels the world expand beyond the limits of ordinary perception. In memory, Polota is not merely scenery: it is a border crossing within the self, a place where inherited social life and an almost limitless sense of life meet.

Setting and Access

Another way out of Polotzk led across the bridge over Polota. Family parties sometimes took this route, bringing along cousins and aunts for the day. Mary remembers these relations with renewed affection because they shared the country excursions and were willing to walk; she also recalls that, as a very small and weak child, she may sometimes have been carried by one of her large uncles. The river therefore belongs first to a social landscape of shared movement, kinship, and remembered care rather than to solitary wilderness.

Polota was a lesser stream in relation to the Dvina River, which was said to swallow it many times a day. Yet the smaller river could become immense in memory. Mary imagines planting a lilac or rose on the bank where an important inner event occurred, turning the spot into a living memorial to the life that first bloomed in her. The contrast between the river’s modest physical scale and its capacity to flood the narrator’s imagination gives Polota its distinctive symbolic force.

Excursions and Seasonal Life

The approach to Polota passes through the ordinary pleasures of a country outing. Children run across the bridge, hearing their sturdy shoes clatter on the timbers, recall the fruit of a walled orchard, visit a wayside inn, and enter an ice house where greenish masses of ice gleam in the half-light. They drink sweet black lager beer in the sunny doorway, carrying away the taste, smell, wonder, and chill of the place. On the return journey, fatigue, stars, and the men’s blessing of the new moon fold the excursion back into the rhythms of home and religious life.

The river is also a recurring Sabbath-eve destination. On Friday afternoons in summer, once the week’s work was finished and Jewish households had been cleaned in readiness for the Sabbath, women and girls went down to Polota in groups, talking, laughing, and bathing. Their section lay above Bonderoff’s gristmill, where a green bank sloped toward still water that suddenly broke into the swirl and spray of the mill race. The woods screened the bathers, and the customary absence of bathing costumes caused no embarrassment among women accustomed to seeing one another naked in the public hot baths.

This bathing place provides a rare image of collective female ease and physical freedom within a society that defined a girl’s proper future through domestic labor, marriage, and motherhood. The bathers played, splashed, and laughed with streaming hair and unconstrained gestures, but the freedom depended on privacy and communal ownership of the site. When Gentile boys intruded, the women panicked, huddled low in the water, hid behind inadequate clothing, or threw pebbles and pursued the offenders with slaps, cuffs, and curses. Polota thus shelters female sociability while also revealing how vulnerable that sociability is to an outside gaze.

The River and Spiritual Awakening

The most consequential visit occurs in early spring, above the bridge. Mary and the others rest while green leaves tremble, bright grass sparkles, and the sky and earth seem like warm hands enclosing living things. Across the river, a market garden lies yellow-green with its first growth. In the black furrows, a peasant works his plow, leaving a fresh dark line at every turn. When he begins to sing, Mary hears only the melody, yet its meaning rises in her heart as a song of the earth and of the earth’s hopes.

The scene changes the scale of her consciousness. She listens tensely and feels that she is discovering things; something in her seems to gasp for life and then lie still. Though she remains a little child in a small body, she experiences what she calls Life Universal as suddenly bursting upon her. For the brief span of a wild heartbeat, she feels that her hand has touched the Great Pulse before her fingers slip away. The river, the plow, the song, the sky, and the soil form one sensory field in which life is encountered bodily before it can be explained intellectually.

Mary later interprets this moment as her first spiritual self-birth. Human beings, she argues, are not born all at once: the body comes first, while the spirit grows through slower and painful successive births. The physical mother bears the first labor, but the individual bears the longer labor of inner development. She therefore wants a rose to bloom on Polota’s green bank as a token of eternal life. The proposed flower gives the recollection a ritual shape, preserving a fleeting childhood perception through a natural object that will itself continue to grow.

Memory, Migration, and Expansion

Polota also gains force through contrast with the later world of migration. Before America entered Mary’s imagination, the Dvina had represented the great waters of the world; after the voyage, the sea and the unobstructed sky enlarged her sense of the earth and the universe. At the same time, the remembered Polota remains the earlier place where the world first exceeded her inherited explanations. The river is therefore not displaced by America. It is the first point in a sequence of expansions through which perception, geography, and identity become larger.

That sequence is accompanied by letters, departures, and the circulation of people. Joseph Antin’s letter before boarding the ship gives America to the child as a dream, while news of Hannah Hayye’s steamer ticket sends visitors from across Polotzk, both sides of the Dvina, and beyond Polota into the family’s street. Later, the family’s passage from the pier to Wall Street begins its initiation into American ways, and the crowded immigrant household in Boston continues to lodge newcomers from Polotzk until they find permanent homes. Against this transnational movement, Polota remains the remembered local crossing: a place from which one goes outward, but also a place to which memory repeatedly returns.

Narrative Significance

Polota joins several kinds of boundary that the memoir keeps testing. Its bridge carries relatives from town toward the countryside; its banks separate and protect women’s bathing; its water connects a lesser stream to the Dvina; and its landscape opens a child’s consciousness to a life larger than the social world that has confined her. The river’s importance lies precisely in this tension between limitation and enlargement. It is physically near Polotzk, yet it becomes the site where Mary first senses an immeasurable world.

The later account of nature study gives this early experience a retrospective continuation. Mary remembers that she once regarded natural history with indifference, preferring books about more conventional heroes, but a lecture by Mr. Emerson on spiders teaches her to see a living creature through its struggle, instincts, safeguards, and fitness to its surroundings. The Natural History Club’s excursion to Nahant then turns observation into collective practice, as its members study marine life in tide pools and collect starfish, limpets, and sea urchins. Polota is the earliest and most intimate version of that education: before formal lessons or scientific clubs, the river, the plowman’s melody, and the expanding spring landscape teach Mary to attend to life. Its lasting meaning is the memory of a first contact with the world as a living totality.