Tisha B'Av

Tisha B'Av, known in English as the Ninth of Ab, is the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar's most solemn day, a fast of mourning kept in remembrance of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. In Mary Antin's account of her Polotzk childhood, this anniversary of national catastrophe becomes the setting for a small, telling drama of a child trying and failing to feel the grief that piety demands. The day that ought to have bound her most tightly to her people's sorrow instead exposes her as an outsider to her own tradition, a doubter before she had words for doubt.

The Ritual and Its Setting

The observance Mary describes is the traditional one: on the eve of the Ninth of Ab, the women of Polotzk gathered to lament the fall of the sacred edifice as if it had happened only yesterday. They sat on humble stools in stocking feet, dressed in shabby clothes with dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus and wringing their hands, enacting a grief so vivid that the ancient ruin seemed present in the very dust and ashes around them. At the center of this circle sat Mary's mother, the only good reader among the women, who recited the story of the cruel destruction to the assembled mourners. The scene was one of collective memory made flesh, a community performing its history through ritual lamentation.

The Child's Failed Performance

Mary joined the circle in the candlelight, wringing her hands and moaning with the rest, but she was always slow of tears and could not weep. Wanting to look like the others, she streaked her cheeks with the only moisture at hand, manufacturing tears to match the genuine grief around her. The fraud did not survive contact with the congregation. Somebody looked up and caught her in the act; she grinned, and the woman giggled. Another woman looked up, and the giggling spread. Demoralization swept around the circle as honest laughter snuffed out artificial grief. When her mother at last looked up with red and astonished eyes, Mary was banished from the feast of tears.

The expulsion was comic rather than cruel, but its meaning was sharp. The child who could not summon tears for the Temple's fall was, by her own later admission, a fraud among the pious, and the laughter that unmasked her was the first public sign of a private distance from the faith that surrounded her. The scene foreshadows the freethinker she would become, the girl who would one day defy at least two religions in defence of free thought, and who would later sit at a Christian table eating ham with furious determination. The burrs that followed were a fitting emblem: returning promptly to her playmates in the street, who were pelting each other with burrs according to the custom of that sad anniversary, Mary found herself distinguished among them because her curly hair caught a generous number of the prickly emblems of mortification and woe. She bristled with them, a child literally adorned with the symbols of a sorrow she could not feel.

Doubt and the Sabbath Order

The Tisha B'Av episode belongs to a larger pattern of religious questioning that Mary traces through her childhood. Not long after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief, she discovered by accident that she was not the only doubter in Polotzk. Lying wakeful one Friday night, staring from the dark into the lighted room adjoining hers, she watched the Sabbath candles sputter and go out one by one while the lamp hanging from the ceiling still burned high. She understood the elaborate system of prohibitions that governed the night: the lamp must burn until Natasha, the Gentile chorewoman, came in the morning to put it out, remove the candlesticks from the table, unseal the oven, and do the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on the Sabbath. The simple prohibition to labor on the Sabbath day had been construed by zealous commentators to mean much more, forbidding even the touching of any instrument of labor or commerce, the lighting of a fire, or the touching of anything that contained or had contained fire, were it only a cold candlestick or a burned match. The child who could not weep for the Temple was also the child who lay awake questioning the logic of a faith that required a Gentile woman to perform its most basic domestic acts.

The Taste of Memory and the Loss of Ritual

Tisha B'Av, like the Sabbath and the other observances of Mary's childhood, belongs to a world of ritual that America would dissolve. The same memoir that records her banishment from the feast of tears also records her later hunger for the tastes of that lost world, the Polotzk cheese cakes eaten on Sabbath evenings before the lighting of the week-day lamp, whose flavor she insists could never be reproduced by any cook, for it takes history to make such a cake. She dreams away half-hours on the immortal flavor of those thick cheese cakes, and when she tries to recover the taste of her cousin's cherries by eating American cherries with the stones, she finds the fruit has no such flavor to yield. The old species of cherry, she fears, is extinct in Polotzk. The rituals and the tastes are bound together: both belong to a Polotzk that exists only in memory, and both are lost to the American life that replaced it. Her mother, in her assiduous imitation of everything American, has forgotten the secrets of Polotzk cookery, and Mary is the richer in memories for her omissions. The Ninth of Ab, the day of national mourning, becomes in retrospect one more flavor of a vanished world, preserved not by observance but by the ache of recollection.

The Day's Place in the Memoir's Structure

The Tisha B'Av scene is one of the earliest and most revealing of Mary's religious doubts, and it establishes a pattern that runs through the entire memoir. The child who faked tears at the lamentation is the same child who would later declare herself a freethinker in the schoolyard, who would eat ham at Miss Dillingham's tea table with squirming and self-contempt, and who would discover, over and over again, that she was a wonderful thing, being human, the heir of the ages, with all that has been in her and continuing to be in her immortal self. The day of destruction, in her telling, becomes a day of self-discovery, the moment when the mask of piety slipped and the doubter beneath was first seen. It is a small scene, a child's failed performance, but it carries the weight of the memoir's central theme: the slow, painful, and sometimes comic process by which a Jewish child of Polotzk became an American freethinker, made over by a new world that demanded she abandon the rituals of the old.