In the geography of Mary Antin's earliest childhood, the world was divided into two parts: Polotzk, where she lived, and a strange land called Russia, where one's father went on business and where so many bad things happened that mothers and grandmothers cried at the railroad station. But after a while there came to her knowledge the existence of another division, a region intermediate between Polotzk and Russia. It seemed there was a place called Vitebsk, and one called Vilna, and Riga, and some others. From those places came photographs of uncles and cousins one had never seen, and letters, and sometimes the uncles themselves. These uncles were just like people in Polotzk; the people in Russia, one understood, were very different. In answer to one's questions, the visiting uncles said all sorts of silly things, to make everybody laugh; and so one never found out why Vitebsk and Vilna, since they were not Polotzk, were not as sad as Russia. Mother hardly cried at all when the uncles went away.

Riga and the Pale of Settlement

Riga's significance is defined by its inclusion in the Pale of Settlement, the legal boundary that confined Jewish life in the Russian Empire. Mary Antin recalls the gradual, drop-by-drop realization that Polotzk and Vitebsk and Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the "Pale of Settlement," and within this area the Czar commanded her to stay, with her father and mother and friends, and all other people like them. They must not be found outside the Pale, because they were Jews. This knowledge came so gradually that it could not shock her; it trickled into her consciousness drop by drop. By the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. Riga, as one of the named cities within this Pale, was thus part of the fence around Polotzk, part of the world divided into Jews and Gentiles. The city was a place where Jews could legally live, but it was also a place from which they could not freely leave, a fact that made the later emigration to America all the more momentous.

The restrictions of the Pale were reinforced by the harsh realities of military conscription, which hung over the Jewish communities of cities like Riga. Most men of twenty-one, the age of conscription, were already married and had children. During their absence their families suffered, their business often was ruined. At the end of their term they were beggars, sent home from their military post with a free ticket for the return journey and a few kopecks a day for expenses, hurried back into the Pale like escaped prisoners. The Czar was done with them. If within a limited time they were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in chains. The dread of this service drove men to inflict injuries on themselves, submitting to operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs that caused horrible sufferings, in the hope of escaping the service. Often the deformity intended to be temporary proved incurable, so that there were many men in Polotzk blind of one eye, or hard of hearing, or lame, as a result of these secret practices; but these things were easier to bear than the memory of four years in the Czar's service. Riga, as a city within the Pale, was part of this system of confinement and conscription that shaped the lives of its Jewish inhabitants.

A Place of Family Connection

The intermediate regions, including Riga, were distinguished from Russia by their human connections. From those places came photographs of uncles and cousins one had never seen, and letters, and sometimes the uncles themselves. These uncles were just like people in Polotzk, in contrast to the people in Russia, who were understood to be very different. The visiting uncles answered one's questions with all sorts of silly things, to make everybody laugh, and so one never found out why Vitebsk and Vilna, since they were not Polotzk, were not as sad as Russia. Mother hardly cried at all when the uncles went away, a telling detail that marked these intermediate places as less threatening than Russia itself. Riga, like Vitebsk and Vilna, was a place where family members could live and visit, a part of the Jewish world that was not Polotzk but was not the alien, dangerous Russia either.

This network of family connection across the intermediate regions continued to matter even after the family's emigration to America. When the steamer ticket for America arrived, the news spread all over Polotzk that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America, and a steady stream of people poured into the street, both day and night, till the hour of departure. Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors came from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere. The visitors rehearsed the departing family in long messages for their friends in America, praying that they deliver them promptly on their arrival. Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, for the eleventh time repeating herself, begged a promise to find out about a relative who had emigrated to America eighteen months ago, fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new, who had sent one letter describing his arrival at Castle Garden and then vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him. The web of connection that linked Polotzk to places like Riga and Vilna extended across the ocean, carrying messages and anxieties between the old world and the new.

The Contrast with America

The meaning of Riga and the other cities of the Pale was thrown into sharp relief by the family's arrival in America. The three small rooms into which the father ushered the family in Boston contained only the necessary beds, with lean mattresses; a few wooden chairs; a table or two; a mysterious iron structure, which later turned out to be a stove; a couple of unornamental kerosene lamps; and a scanty array of cooking-utensils and crockery. And yet they were all impressed with their new home and its furniture. It was not only because they had just passed through their seven lean years, cooking in earthen vessels, eating black bread on holidays and wearing cotton; it was chiefly because these wooden chairs and tin pans were American chairs and pans that they shone glorious in their eyes. The initiation into American ways began with the first step on the new soil, as the father found occasion to instruct or correct the children even on the way from the pier to Wall Street, explaining the word "greenhorn." They did not want to be "greenhorns," and gave the strictest attention to the father's instructions. The contrast between the confined cities of the Pale, where Jews were prisoners commanded to stay, and the freedom of America, where even a shabby apartment shone glorious because it was American, was the central transformation of the memoir.

This transformation was also a spiritual one, connected to the natural world in ways that echo the geography of the old country. Mary Antin recalls that Robert Louis Stevenson, in one of his delightful essays, credits the lover with a feeling of remorse and shame at the contemplation of that part of his life which he lived without his beloved, content with his barren existence. It is with just such a feeling of remorse that she looks back to her bookworm days, before she began the study of natural history outdoors; and with a feeling of shame akin to the lover's she confesses how late in life nature took the first place in her affections. The moment of awakening came when she watched a peasant push his plow in a market garden on the opposite slope of the Polota, yellow-green with first growth, and heard him begin to sing a rude plowman's song. Only the melody reached her, but the meaning sprang up in her heart to fit it, a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. She sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention, feeling herself discovering things. Something in her gasped for life, and lay still. She was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon her. For a moment she had her little hand on the Great Pulse, but her fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat she knew, and then she was again a simple child, looking to her earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for her, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in her. This first self-birth happened that spring day of her early springs, and she would plant a rose on the green bank of the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life.

The natural world continued to be a source of renewal in America, in contrast to the urban confinement of the Pale. At the Natural History Club's excursion to Nahant, the members spent the day studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing the starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. There had been a merry luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and strange jokes, intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing away their seaweed cushions, drowning their transparent pools, spouting in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam. This immersion in nature, so different from the cramped life of the Pale, was part of the process by which the immigrant child became an American, and by which the cities of the old world, including Riga, receded into the background of a new life defined by freedom, learning, and the open sea.