Soldiers of Nicholas

Soldiers of Nicholas were Jewish boys taken from their mothers under the military system of Nicholas I, isolated from their communities, raised among Gentiles, and subjected to pressure to accept baptism. In Mary Antin’s childhood understanding, they were not merely figures from the past: they were men still living in Polotzk whose bodies and faces preserved the history of state violence, while their refusal to abandon Jewish faith made them sources of collective pain and pride.

Identity and Historical Setting

The name referred to Jewish children, often only seven or eight years old, who were seized by agents of the Czar and prepared for military service lasting until the age of forty. Their removal was designed to sever every ordinary bond of identity. They were carried to distant villages where relatives could not trace them, separated so that no two would remain together, and given false names. A child taken from his mother’s lap was thus cut off from family, language, memory, and the Jewish settlements that had defined his world.

The system operated within the broader legal and social confinement of Russian Jewry. Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other towns were grouped inside the Pale of Settlement, where the Czar commanded Jews to remain. The restriction turned geography into a form of imprisonment: Jews could not freely travel beyond the Pale, and military service became another mechanism through which the state controlled both their bodies and their religious identity. The older generation’s stories made this history immediate for Antin, because men who had endured the service were still no older than her grandfather when she was a child.

Seizure, Isolation, and Religious Coercion

After being placed with distant Gentile families, the boys were treated as servants or slaves. Antin recalls the image of a lonely child handed over to a dirty and brutal peasant, kept with the pigs, and then delivered to priests. The priests used flogging, starvation, terror, and calculated promises of food, fine clothing, freedom from labor, advancement, and honor. The purpose was not simply to train soldiers; it was to manufacture Christian subjects by breaking the child’s attachment to Jewish life.

The boys nevertheless continued to pray secretly in Hebrew. As years passed, a child might forget his mother’s face and lose much of the religious knowledge learned in childhood, yet retain the Shema as a final interior remnant of origin. That fragment carried enormous significance in Antin’s account. The boy’s Jewishness is represented not as a complete set of undisturbed practices but as a stubborn continuity that survives even when memory, family, name, and community have been systematically stripped away.

One account known to Joseph Antin concerns an exceptionally intelligent boy whom priests especially wanted to convert. They first appealed to his ambition by promising to make him a general or a noble. When he continued to pray, they tortured him and confined him. While he slept from exhaustion, a priest baptized him without his consent. On waking, the boy was told that he was Christian and was brought a crucifix to kiss. He rejected it, but the Church treated the involuntary baptism as binding, and he spent the rest of his life moving between prison and hospital while continuing to say the Hebrew prayers. The story exposes the system’s central cruelty: even physical resistance could be declared legally and religiously invalid by the institution imposing the violence.

Return, Ruin, and the Burden of Service

Those who survived and returned unbaptized came back as damaged men. The boys who had been removed from Jewish homes became, after decades of service, broken adults without homes or reliable clues to their origins. Some wandered among Jewish settlements, searching for their families; some begged from door to door and concealed torture scars beneath rags. If a man had yielded to baptism merely to obtain a temporary respite, the Church continued to claim him even when he protested that he remained a Jew, and practicing Jewish rites could bring further punishment.

The later military system was less openly catastrophic than the old regime, but it still forced Jewish recruits to violate the laws of daily religious life. Soldiers could be required to eat trefah, work on Sabbath, shave their beards, and perform reverence toward Christian objects. They could not attend daily synagogue services, and Gentile comrades mocked their private devotions. When they came home after four years, they carried the stigma of having lived as Gentiles under compulsion. For observant Jews, the damage was therefore spiritual as well as physical: the state made religious transgression an unavoidable condition of service.

Military conscription also devastated families materially. Most men reached the age of twenty-one already married with children, so their absence could ruin a business and leave dependents without support. At discharge, men were sent back toward the Pale as beggars, given a return ticket and only a few kopecks a day. A good uniform could be stripped from them and replaced by a shabby one. If they were later found outside the permitted area, they could be seized and transported home in chains, as though they were escaped prisoners. The military system thus extended beyond the barracks: it regulated movement, impoverished households, and returned men to the same restricted world from which the state had taken them.

Memory, Fear, and Collective Meaning

Antin’s childhood fear of pogroms and forced baptism is inseparable from the stories of Soldiers of Nicholas. Jewish children were told that priests and nuns might seize unprotected children and baptize them, an outcome imagined as worse than torture or death. The prospect of being forced to kneel before Christian images, kiss the cross, and forswear the One God made religious identity appear more precious than bodily safety. The stories were historically past, but they shaped the emotional weather of the present.

The men who returned from Nicholas I’s service made that past visible. Antin writes that there were faces in Polotzk that could make a person grow old in a minute: faces of men who had served and come back unbaptized. The white church in the square became, in her imagination, a reminder of what such men had endured. Church bells on market days seemed to call not only worshippers but also the threat of renewed coercion. The state’s earlier violence had therefore become a recurring presence in ordinary streets, sounds, and buildings.

This memory also explains why Antin could regard religious resistance with “pain and pride.” The boys’ suffering demonstrated the terrible power of the state, but their continued prayers demonstrated that the state could not wholly command inward allegiance. Soldiers of Nicholas stand at the intersection of vulnerability and defiance: they are children made into instruments of imperial policy, yet also witnesses to a faith that survives the destruction of family, name, language, and bodily freedom.

Narrative Significance

Within Antin’s larger account of movement from Polotzk to America, Soldiers of Nicholas mark the extreme condition from which the promise of free education and civic equality appears to offer deliverance. Her later schooling gives language the power to enlarge a life: Hebrew reading with Reb' Lebe opens a sacred imaginative world, while English instruction under Miss Nixon and Miss Dillingham leads toward American public life. The contrast is not merely between two school systems. It is between a society that restricts Jewish bodies and a society that, in Antin’s remembered courtroom and schoolroom scenes, allows immigrants to claim equal treatment and intellectual development.

The figure also complicates any simple story of Americanization. Antin’s new English identity does not erase the Hebrew prayers, the memory of Polotzk, or the inherited knowledge of state persecution. Her love of English and her conviction that America offers liberty are formed against the terror represented by Nicholas’s soldiers. The narrative’s freedom is consequently measured by an earlier condition of captivity: the child who can learn, speak, move, and imagine in America understands those possibilities through the history of boys who were prevented from doing so.

Soldiers of Nicholas therefore function as a collective state of historical trauma rather than as a single character. They reveal how imperial law could convert childhood into military property, how religious coercion could continue after physical service ended, and how the scars of that policy remained visible in Polotzk’s Jewish community. Their stories give Antin’s memoir one of its deepest contrasts: the passage from a world in which identity had to be defended against the state to a country where education and public justice allow identity to become a platform for expansion rather than merely a shield against annihilation.