Russia

Russia as the Distant and Forbidden Land

To the young Mary Antin, the world was divided into two parts: Polotzk, where she lived, and a strange land called Russia. Russia was the place where one's father went on business, a place so far off and associated with so many bad things that the women of the family would cry at the railroad station when a man departed for it. The journey was a sign of trouble, undertaken only when a man could not make a living at home, was drafted for the army, or had a lawsuit. No one went to Russia for pleasure, for in Russia lived the Czar and a great many cruel people, and there were dreadful prisons from which people never came back. This early perception establishes Russia as a place of fear and sorrow, a realm fundamentally different from the familiar and relatively safe world of Polotzk.

The mystery of geography deepened when Mary, at about eight years old, traveled to Vitebsk and discovered that the Dvina River, which she had always believed ended where Polotzk ended, continued on and on, like a railroad track. This revelation led her to understand that the world was not divided by physical fences but was continuous: Polotzk, more Polotzk, Vitebsk, and then on to Russia. This realization made Russia seem less a separate country and more an extension of the same land, yet a formidable barrier still interposed between them. She learned that people from Polotzk were sometimes turned back from Russia before finishing their business and were often cruelly treated on the way. There were certain places in Russia—St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev—where her father, uncle, or neighbor must never come at all, no matter what important matters invited them. The police would seize them and send them back to Polotzk like wicked criminals, even though they had done no wrong.

The Pale of Settlement and the Legal Cage

The crucial lesson of Mary's childhood was the existence of the Pale of Settlement. She came to understand that Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and some other places were grouped together as the Pale, and within this area the Czar commanded her to stay, with her father, mother, friends, and all other people like them. They must not be found outside the Pale because they were Jews. This knowledge trickled into her consciousness drop by drop, so gradually that it could not shock her. By the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The world was thus divided into Jews and Gentiles, and the Pale was the physical manifestation of this division, a fence around Polotzk that was not made of wood or stone but of imperial decree.

The consequences of this legal cage were pervasive and brutal. The Czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family. Mary recounts the story of a poor locksmith who owed the Czar three hundred rubles because his brother had escaped from Russia before serving his term in the army. This fine, which applied only to Jews, made the entire family liable. The police came and attached his household goods, including his young bride's trousseau, and the sale brought only thirty-five rubles. After a year, the police came again for the balance, putting their seal on everything they found. The bride was in bed with her first baby, a boy, and the circumcision was to be the next day. The police did not leave a sheet to wrap the child in for the operation. This story illustrates the relentless and crushing nature of the state's demands, which could strip a family of even the most basic necessities.

The tax burden was equally bewildering. Mary heard of taxes on houses, on rents from houses, on business, and on profits. The town collected taxes, the county collected taxes, and the central government collected taxes, and the chief of police was always present. There were taxes for public works, yet rotten pavements went on rotting year after year. When a bridge was to be built, special taxes were levied, and even a railroad bridge across the Dvina, while open to the military, could be used by the people only by individual permission. Her uncle explained the excise duties on tobacco, which was taxed at every step of its process: the tobacco separately, the paper, the mouthpiece, and the finished product. There was no tax on the smoke, which the Czar must have overlooked. The only way to make business pay was to cheat the Government of part of the duties, but playing tricks on the Czar was dangerous, with so many spies watching his interests. People who sold cigarettes without the government seal got more gray hairs than bank notes out of their business, and the constant risk, worry, and dread of a police raid in the night left very little margin of profit or comfort.

Military Conscription and Its Horrors

Military service was another serious burden that the Russian state imposed on its Jewish subjects. Every man had to serve in the army for four years, and a Jewish recruit was likely to be treated with severity, no matter if his behavior were perfect. The thing that really mattered was the necessity of breaking the Jewish laws of daily life while in the service. A soldier often had to eat trefah and work on Sabbath. He had to shave his beard and do reverence to Christian things. He could not attend daily services at the synagogue, and his private devotions were disturbed by the jeers and insults of his coarse Gentile comrades. He might resort to all sorts of tricks and shams, but he was still obliged to violate Jewish law. When he returned home, at the end of his term of service, he could not rid himself of the stigma of those enforced sins, for he had led the life of a Gentile for four years.

Piety alone was enough to make the Jews dread military service, but there were other things that made it a serious burden. Most men of twenty-one, the age of conscription, were already married and had children. During their absence their families suffered, and 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. If they happened to have a good uniform at the time of their dismissal, it was stripped from them and replaced by a shabby one. In this fashion they were hurried back into the Pale, like escaped prisoners. The Czar was done with them, and if within a limited time they were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in chains. The desperation this system caused led men to inflict injuries on themselves, submitting to operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs that caused horrible sufferings, in the hope of being rejected at the physical examination. Often the deformity intended to be temporary proved incurable, so that there were many men in Polotzk blind of one eye, hard of hearing, or lame, but these things were easier to bear than the memory of four years in the Czar's service.

The Religious Fortress and the Lack of Nationalism

Within the wall raised around her birthplace by the vigilance of the police, Mary saw another wall, higher, thicker, and more impenetrable. This was the wall which the Czar with all his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of torture could not pierce, and the mob with their firebrands could not destroy. This wall within the wall was the religious integrity of the Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale in defiance of their jailers, a stronghold built of the ruins of their pillaged homes and cemented with the blood of their murdered children. Harassed on every side and thwarted in every normal effort, the Russian Jew fell back upon the only thing that never failed him: his hereditary faith in God. In the study of the Torah he found the balm for all his wounds, and the minute observance of traditional rites became the expression of his spiritual cravings.

This religious life, however, was accompanied by a profound lack of national feeling. Mary knew that Polotzk was not her country; it was goluth, exile. On many occasions in the year they prayed to God to lead them out of exile, and the beautiful Passover service closed with the words, "Next year, may we be in Jerusalem." But the story of the Exodus was not history to her in the sense that the story of the American Revolution later became. It was more like a glorious myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting her off from the actual world by linking her with a world of phantoms. 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 or any hero other than the Czar. As they had no country, so they had no flag to love, and the banner of the House of Romanoff became the emblem of their latter-day bondage. Even a child would know how to hate the flag that they were forced, on pain of severe penalties, to hoist above their housetops in celebration of the advent of one of their oppressors. They hated the uniform of the soldier to the last brass button, for on the person of a Gentile it was the symbol of tyranny, and on the person of a Jew it was the emblem of shame.

Russia as the Antithesis of America

The oppressive reality of Russia is what gives the American experience its profound meaning. Mary's father, Joseph Antin, 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, and to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only thirty-two when he landed, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was hungry for his untasted manhood. Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before the family joined him, had been his application for naturalization, and he took the remaining steps with eager promptness, becoming a citizen at the earliest moment allowed by the law.

The contrast between the two worlds is also evident in the narrator's own development. Mary began life in the Middle Ages, as she puts it, and found herself a contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling with its latest thought. The legal restrictions of Russia, which denied Jews basic rights and subjected them to arbitrary fines and conscription, are directly opposed to the American Constitution, which Mary invokes in the schoolyard when her classmates dispute her right to have any kind of God she chose. "This is a free country," she reminds them, a statement that would have been unthinkable in Russia. The very concept of a "Fellow Citizen" with rights is an American one, born of the freedom that Russia denied. The memory of Russia, with its police raids, its ruinous taxes, its forced military service, and its religious persecution, is the dark backdrop against which the bright promise of America—its free public schools, its naturalization, its separation of church and state—shines all the more brilliantly. Russia is not just a place in the memoir; it is the embodiment of everything America is not, and the reason the family's journey to the New World is a journey from bondage to freedom.