Sabbath lamp

In the crowded living-room of the Antin family's home in Polotzk, a single hanging lamp burned through the night, suspended from the ceiling as the one fixed point of light in a household governed by the rhythms of the Jewish Sabbath. To the child Mary Antin, lying wakeful in her little bed in the dark adjoining room, this lamp was simply part of the domestic landscape, an object so familiar it was almost invisible. Yet this ordinary fixture was destined to become the most consequential object in her early spiritual life, the silent witness to a transgression that would unravel the entire fabric of her inherited faith and set her on the path toward American freethought. The lamp's true significance lies not in its light, but in the moment a hand reached up to dim it.

The Lamp and the Law of the Sabbath

The lamp's place in the household was defined by the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. The simple prohibition against labor on the Sabbath had been construed by zealous commentators to mean far more than refraining from work: one must not even touch any instrument of labor or commerce, and it was forbidden to light a fire, or to touch anything that contained a fire, or had contained fire, were it only a cold candlestick or a burned match. The hanging lamp, therefore, could not be extinguished by any Jewish hand once the Sabbath had begun. It was left to burn until morning, when Natasha, the Gentile chorewoman, would come in to put it out, remove the candlesticks from the table, unseal the oven, and perform the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on the holy day. The lamp was thus not merely a source of illumination but a daily monument to the boundary between the sacred and the profane, a boundary maintained by the labor of a Gentile woman whose very presence in the household was a concession to the demands of the law.

The Night of Transgression

One Friday night, the lamp became the stage for a quiet drama of apostasy. Mary lay wakeful, staring from the dark into the lighted room, and watched the Sabbath candles sputter and go out one by one as the hour grew late, while the hanging lamp still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed, and the lamp would burn until Natasha arrived in the morning. But the light apparently troubled somebody else. Mary saw her father come from his room, which also adjoined the living-room, and approach the lamp. What was he going to do? Could she believe her eyes? Her father touched the lighted lamp, and shook it, as if to see how much oil there was left. Petrified in her place, unable to move or make a sound, she watched as he turned down the light a very little, and waited, then lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. By the slightest degrees he turned the light down, and Mary understood: in case anyone were awake, it would appear as if the lamp was going out of itself. He wanted to put it out, but he would not risk having it known. He was the only one she could see, and she had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose she was awake. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin.

The Collapse of Piety

The shock of this discovery was profound, though the child could not fully articulate its meaning. Mary understood that learning and piety were the things most valued in her family, that her father was a scholar, and that piety was the fruit of sacred learning. Yet her father had deliberately violated the Sabbath. The weight of this act was measured against the sacrifices of her grandmother, who had fasted half the days of the year to save her son's teacher's fee, who walked almost barefoot in the cruel snow to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him, and who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son. It was measured against her mother, who was given to him with her youth and good name and dowry in exchange for his learning and piety, and who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed them and keep them while he sat on the benches of the scholars. The lamp, in that single night, revealed that the pillar of the family's spiritual life was himself a doubter, and the revelation cracked the foundation of the child's world.

The Lamp as Proof of a Godless World

The lamp's legacy was not confined to that one night of secret transgression. When the family emigrated to America and joined the father in Boston, Mary observed that he did not wear the sacred fringes, did not put on the phylacteries and pray, and went out to work on the Sabbath exactly as on a week day. She was neither surprised nor shocked, remembering the Sabbath night when he had with his own hand turned out the lamp. The memory of that act became the interpretive key to her new life: she understood why God had not annihilated her with his lightnings that time when she purposely carried something in her pocket on the Sabbath. There was no God, and there was no sin. The lamp, which had once enforced the law by its very unextinguishability, now proved the law's emptiness. The object that had been the emblem of prohibition became the emblem of liberation, the concrete evidence that the thunder of Jehovah would not fall, and that she was free, like other little girls in the street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and obligations at every step.

The Lamp in the New World

The fate of the Sabbath lamp in America is telling. In the family's flat on Union Place in Boston, there was no such hanging lamp, and no bathtub either, a detail that marks the complete transformation of domestic life. The first meal in the new home was an object lesson of variety, with the father producing several kinds of food from little tin cans with printing all over them, and attempting to introduce the newcomers to a queer, slippery kind of fruit he called banana. The streets were illuminated by so many lamps that burned until morning, and the father said people did not need to carry lanterns. In America, light was free, and the streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day. The old lamp, with its burden of law and its secret night of transgression, was replaced by a public abundance of light that required no Gentile woman to extinguish it and no secret hand to dim it. The object that had witnessed the family's most intimate crisis of faith was left behind in Polotzk, its function absorbed by a city that made light itself a free and public good, a fitting emblem of the new world where the old prohibitions no longer held sway.