The Promised Land by Mary Antin

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Review by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Mary Antin was born in 1881 in Polotzk, an impoverished Polish town within the borders of the Pale of settlement. In her lyrical prose she evokes a childhood that alternated between dire poverty interrupted by pogroms and a life enriched by community and Jewish ritual.

Antin was part of the wave of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. At the age of 13, she arrived with her mother and three siblings to join her father in Boston. The history of American Jewish immigration and assimilation is integral to Mary Antin’s classic autobiography, The Promised Land.

The genius of The Promised Land is in the small details which speak volumes about Mary’s new life in America. Her first meal in America “was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.”

Like many Jews of her generation, Mary’s goal was to shed her immigrant past and become a full-fledged American. Always on the verge of financial disaster, the Antins lived in the tenements of Boston and Chelsea, finally settling in Boston’s South End. Antin relates each move as a story within the larger story of her family’s attempts to achieve the comfortable life that eludes them in America. Mary rose above the fray of a hardscrabble life by excelling at school. Her first triumph came when she wrote a poem about George Washington that was published in the Boston Herald.

I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot.

Mary’s father carried a clipping of the poem as an example of what his daughter had achieved through diligence and determination to assimilate into American life. But the historical plight of the Jew overshadows Mary’s success in her new country.

We knew what it was to be Jews in exile, from the spiteful treatment we suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin who crossed himself; and thence we knew that Israel had good reasons to pray for deliverance. But the story of the Exodus was not history to me in the sense that the story of the American Revolution was.

Yet the language of the Exodus frames Antin’s story. Chapters hang on the imagery of the ultimate Jewish myth. “The Exodus, The Promised Land, Manna, The Burning Bush” move Antin’s story toward another epic of the Jewish people – America as the great success story of the Jewish people. Mary Antin embodies that story. Her parents resisted giving in to criticism for allowing a healthy young woman to study instead of going out to work. Mary’s American dream was an economic drain on the family. But it was also the dream that inspired the family.

Even on the playground Mary understood that her rights as an American superseded anti-Semitism. She declares her atheism and causes “a toy riot” among her classmates when she proclaims that nature rather than God created her. In one of the book’s most amusing scenes Antin describes her classmates “as the foes of American Liberty…whispering to those who had not heard that a heretic had been discovered in their midst.” A very wise teacher informed Mary “that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory.” Mary writes, “I felt honored by this private initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State.”

The public school was one way out of the slums. Free education was available to those children who were not pulled out of school prematurely to work. Antin’s family cherished her academic talent, allowing her to spend summers reading in the library instead of working in the family dry goods store. After high school Antin went on to Barnard College where she met a German American professor eleven years her senior. The marriage was an unhappy one and the couple eventually divorced.

The Promised Land was published to great acclaim in 1912 and Antin regularly published fiction in The Atlantic Monthly for more than three decades afterwards. But with the onset of the Second World War, the Jewish immigrant past Antin had been so eager to leave behind tugged at her conscience. Antin acknowledged that she could not return to “the Jewish fold,” but

neither can I in decency continue to enjoy my accidental personal immunity from the penalties of being a Jew in a time of virulent anti-Semitism. The least I can do in my need to share the sufferings of my people, is declare that I am as one of them.

Antin’s solidarity is followed by a watershed moment for American Jews in which they reclaim their Jewish identity without being observant or traditional. My own father’s parents, who were only a decade younger than Mary Antin, also assimilated by educating themselves. Their assimilation was so thorough that they urged my father to indicate “O” on the dog tags that he wore during the Second World War. “O” stood for “other,” indicating that he would accept last rites from any religious tradition. My father, who had never disobeyed his parents before, insisted on the antiquated “H” for Hebrew. If it came to death, he wanted to die as a Jew.

Mary Antin is a brilliant sociologist. “There is never a Jewish community without its scholars,” she notes. “But where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain as Jews.” Antin’s insights on the universal immigrant experience and the particular predicament of the Eastern European Jews who settled in America at the dawn of the 20th century make The Promised Land a classic and its author a legend.

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss the importance of community in the Pale of Settlement.

2. Mary Antin closely observes the role of women in her small Polish town. Comment on her observation that “a girl’s real schoolroom was her mother’s kitchen.”

3. Why did the Antins think it was so necessary to shed religious trappings to assimilate into American life?

4. Discuss how Mary’s newfound patriotism was a viable substitute for Jewish tradition.

5. What role did education play in Jewish assimilation into American life?

6. Discuss Mary’s affecting lesson on the American concept of “Separation of Church and State.”

7. How does the imagery from Exodus work in The Promised Land? Does it add anything to Mary’s story?

8. How did the Second World War affect Mary Antin as a Jew? How did it affect American Jewry?

9. Why is the The Promised Land still relevant almost a hundred years after its publication?

Excerpt

History shows that in all countries where Jews have equal rights with the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science, and learn how to take their ancient religion with them from century to awakening century, dropping nothing by the way but what their growing spirit has outgrown. In countries where progress is bought only at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
Editor: Nancy Sherman
www.jewishreader.org