Tzitzit

In the world of Mary Antin's childhood, the tzitzit—the sacred fringes worn by pious Jewish males—were the most visible sign of religious fidelity, a garment detail that carried the weight of an entire spiritual and communal identity. The fringes were not merely decorative; they were a four-cornered cloth with specially prepared fringes worn by pious males under the outer garments, with the fringes showing, and they played a part in the daily ritual. Their visibility was essential to their function: they were meant to be seen, a constant public declaration of adherence to the commandments, distinguishing the wearer as a Jew in every encounter.

The Fringes as a Fortress Within the Pale

The tzitzit stood at the center of the Jewish community's spiritual resistance to the Russian state. Within the wall raised around Polotzk by the vigilance of the police, there stood another wall, higher, thicker, and more impenetrable—the religious integrity of the Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale in defiance of their jailers, built of the ruins of their pillaged homes and cemented with the blood of their murdered children. The fringes were the visible badge of this inner fortress. When the Czar opened public schools and compelled parents to send their boys for instruction, the Jewish community saw the schools as a trap door to the abyss of apostasy, for the instructors were always Christians and the teaching was Christian. The public school interrupted the boy's sacred studies in the Hebrew school, and the church door gaped for them at the end of the school course. All good Jews rose up against the schools and kept their boys away by every means, fair or foul. When the schools were finally closed, the Jewish boys returned to their Hebrew books in peace, wearing the sacred fringes in plain sight and never polluting their mouths with a word of Russian. The fringes, worn openly, were thus a triumphant sign that the community had withstood the state's assault on its children's souls.

The Fringes in the Heder

The fringes were also central to the daily life of the heder, the Hebrew school where boys studied from morning until night. Mary Antin, visiting her brother's heder to bring him his dinner, observed the boys sitting on benches around the table with their hats on and the sacred fringes hanging beneath their jackets. The fringes were so ordinary, so much a part of the boys' dress, that they marked the very atmosphere of study. The rebbe sat at the end of the table, rehearsing two or three of the boys who were studying the same part, pointing out the words with his wooden pointer so as not to lose the place. Everybody read aloud, the smallest boys repeating the alphabet in a sing-song while the advanced boys read their portions in a different sing-song, each raising his voice to its loudest to drown out the others. The fringes, hanging beneath the jackets, were part of this cacophony of sacred learning, a constant physical reminder that the boys were not merely acquiring literacy but were being formed as Jews.

The Fringes and the Education of Girls

The tzitzit also marked a strict gender boundary within Jewish life. The fringes were worn by males, and their absence for girls was a sign of the limited spiritual and educational expectations placed upon them. A girl was considered "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning with the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called well educated. Girls could not be scholars and rabbonim, and it was not much to be a girl. The heder boy, by contrast, was the hero of the family, served before the other children at table, given shoes when all the girls might go barefoot, and given a plate of hot soup though the others ate dry bread. The fringes, worn only by boys, were a visible emblem of this hierarchy, marking the male child as the bearer of sacred learning and the family's spiritual hope.

The Fringes and the Burden of Conscription

The fringes also carried a painful irony in the context of military conscription, which the Jewish community dreaded not only for its physical hardships but for its spiritual violations. Piety alone was enough to make the Jews dread military service, for a soldier often had to eat trefah and work on the Sabbath, 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 still he was 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 four years he had led the life of a Gentile. The fringes, which could not be worn in the army, were thus a symbol of what was lost in the service—the entire fabric of Jewish daily observance, of which the fringes were the most visible thread.

The Fringes and the American Transformation

The fringes disappear from the narrative as Mary Antin and her family undergo Americanization, and their absence is as significant as their presence was in Polotzk. In America, the father's ambition was not for the preservation of the fringes but for 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. The father, who had been held in leading-strings for most of his life, was hungry for his untasted manhood. The fringes, which had marked the Jewish male as a prisoner of the Pale, gave way to a new kind of visibility: the American citizen. The father's almost first act on landing on American soil 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 fringes, once worn in plain sight as a badge of defiance, were replaced by the freedoms of the New World, where the right to reside, travel, and work wherever one pleased was joined to the freedom of conscience. The tzitzit, in the end, stand as a measure of the distance traveled—from a world where religious identity was a prison wall to a world where it could be set aside in the pursuit of a new self.