The Promised Land

by Mary Antin

We children, while we regretted the passing of a festival, found plenty to content us in the common days of the week. We had everything we needed, and almost everything we wanted. We were welcomed everywhere, petted and praised, abroad as well as at home. I suppose no little girls with whom we played had a more comfortable sense of being well-off than Fetchke and I. "Raphael the Russian's grandchildren" people called us, as if referring to the quarterings in our shield. It was very pleasant to wear fine clothes, to have kopecks to spend at the fruit stalls, and to be pointed at admiringly. Some of the little girls we went with were richer than we, but after all one's mother can wear only one pair of earrings at a time, and our mother had beautiful gold ones that hung down on her neck.

As we grew older, my parents gave us more than physical comfort and social standing to rejoice in. They gave us, or set out to give us, education, which was less common than gold earrings in Polotzk. For the ideal of a modern education was the priceless ware that my father brought back with him from his travels in distant parts. His travels, indeed, had been the making of my father. He had gone away from Polotzk, in the first place, as a man unfit for the life he led, out of harmony with his surroundings, at odds with his neighbors. Never heartily devoted to the religious ideals of the Hebrew scholar, he was more and more a dissenter as he matured, but he hardly knew what he wanted to embrace in place of the ideals he rejected. The rigid scheme of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale offered no opening to any other mode of life. But in the large cities in the east and south he discovered a new world, and found himself at home in it. The Jews among whom he lived in those parts were faithful to the essence of the religion, but they allowed themselves more latitude in practice and observance than the people in Polotzk. Instead of bribing government officials to relax the law of compulsory education for boys, these people pushed in numbers at every open door of culture and enlightenment. Even the girls were given books in Odessa and Kherson, as the rock to build their lives on, and not as an ornament for idleness. My father's mind was ready for the reception of such ideas, and he was inspired by the new view of the world which they afforded him.

When he returned to Polotzk he knew what had been wrong with his life before, and he proceeded to remedy it. He resolved to live, as far as the conditions of existence in Polotzk permitted, the life of a modern man. And he saw no better place to begin than with the education of the children. Outwardly he must conform to the ways of his neighbors, just as he must pay tribute to the policeman on the beat; for standing room is necessary to all operations, and social ostracism could ruin him as easily as police persecution. His children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's children might even be free men. And education was the one means to redemption.

Fetchke and I were started with a rebbe, in the orthodox way, but we were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and we had a secular teacher besides. My sister and I were very diligent pupils, and my father took great satisfaction in our progress and built great plans for our higher education.

My brother, who was five years old when he entered heder, hated to be shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing to him. He cried and protested, but my father was determined that he should not grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant's steps to school. The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go. So the poor boy's life was made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years old, when he went to a modern school where intelligible things were taught, and it proved that it was not the book he hated, but the blindness of the heder.

For a number of peaceful years after my father's return from "far Russia," we led a wholesome life of comfort, contentment, and faith in to-morrow. Everything prospered, and we children grew in the sun. My mother was one with my father in all his plans for us. Although she had spent her young years in the pursuit of the ruble, it was more to her that our teacher praised us than that she had made a good bargain with a tea merchant. Fetchke and Joseph and I, and Deborah, when she grew up, had some prospects even in Polotzk, with our parents' hearts set on the highest things; but we were destined to seek our fortunes in a world which even my father did not dream of when he settled down to business in Polotzk.

Just when he felt himself safe and strong, a long series of troubles set in to harass us, and in a few years' time we were reduced to a state of helpless poverty, in which there was no room to think of anything but bread. My father became seriously ill, and spent large sums on cures that did not cure him. While he was still an invalid, my mother also became ill and kept her bed for the better part of two years. When she got up, it was only to lapse again. Some of us children also fell ill, so that at one period the house was a hospital. And while my parents were incapacitated, the business was ruined through bad management, until a day came when there was not enough money in the cash drawer to pay the doctor's bills.

For some years after they got upon their feet again, my parents struggled to regain their place in the business world, but failed to do so. My father had another period of experimenting with this or that business, like his earlier experience. But everything went wrong, till at last he made a great resolve to begin life all over again. And the way to do that was to start on a new soil. My father determined to emigrate to America.

I have now told who I am, what my people were, how I began life, and why I was brought to a new home. Up to this point I have borrowed the recollections of my parents, to piece out my own fragmentary reminiscences. But from now on I propose to be my own pilot across the seas of memory; and if I lose myself in the mists of uncertainty, or run aground on the reefs of speculation, I still hope to make port at last, and I shall look for welcoming faces on the shore. For the ship I sail in is history, and facts will kindle my beacon fires.