The Promised Land

by Mary Antin

I was petrified in my place. I could neither move nor make a sound. It seemed to me he must feel my eyes bulging at him out of the dark. But he did not know that I was looking; he thought everybody was asleep. He turned down the light a very little, and waited. I did not take my eyes from him. He lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. I watched. By the slightest degrees he turned the light down. I understood. In case any one were awake, it would appear as if the lamp was going out of itself. I was the only one who lay so as to be able to see him, and I had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose I was awake. The light annoyed him, he wanted to put it out, but he would not risk having it known.

I heard my father find his bed in the dark before I dared to draw a full breath. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin. If his mother had seen him do it, it would have broken her heart—his mother who fasted half the days of the year, when he was a boy, to save his teacher's fee; his mother who walked almost barefoot in the cruel snow to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him; his mother who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son, that most precious offering in the eyes of the great God, from the hand of a poor struggling woman. If my mother had seen it, it would have grieved her no less—my mother who was given to him, with her youth and good name and her dowry, in exchange for his learning and piety; my mother who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed them and keep them, while he sat on the benches of the scholars and repaid her labors with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and that piety, of course, was the fruit of sacred learning. And yet my father had deliberately violated the Sabbath.

His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The two sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and their motives were different. I was a child, a girl at that, not yet of the age of moral responsibility. He was a man full grown, passing for one of God's elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute to his scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret experiment, that it was not sinful to carry a burden on the Sabbath day. If God did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of my youth or perhaps it was because of my motive.

According to my elders, my father, by turning out the lamp, committed the sin of Sabbath-breaking. What did my father intend? I could not suppose that his purpose was similar to mine. Surely he, who had lived so long and studied so deeply, had by this time resolved all his doubts. Surely God had instructed him. I could not believe that he did wrong knowingly, so I came to the conclusion that he did not hold it a sin to touch a lighted lamp on Sabbath. Then why was he so secret in his action? That, too, became clear to me. I myself had instinctively adopted secret methods in all my little investigations, and had kept the results to myself. The way in which my questions were received had taught me much. I had a dim, inarticulate understanding of the horror and indignation which my father would excite if he, supposedly a man of piety, should publish the heretical opinion that it was not wrong to handle fire on the Sabbath. To see what remorse my mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the thousand minutiæ of ancient Jewish practice. That which had been taught them as the truth by their fathers and mothers was the whole truth to my good friends and neighbors—that and nothing else. If there were any people in Polotzk who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance with them. But it would never do, it was plain to me, to make public confession of his convictions. Such an act would not only break the hearts of his family, but it would also take the bread from the mouths of his children, and ruin them forever. My sister and my brother and I would come to be called the children of Israel the Apostate, just as Gutke, my playmate, was called the granddaughter of Yankel the Informer. The most innocent of us would be cursed and shunned for the sin of our father.

All this I came to understand, not all at once, but by degrees, as I put this and that together, and brought my childish thoughts to order. I was by no means absorbed in this problem. I played and danced with the other children as heartily as ever, but I brooded in my window corner when there was nothing else to do. I had not the slightest impulse to go to my father, charge him with his unorthodox conduct, and demand an explanation of him. I was quite satisfied that I understood him, and I had not the habit of confidences. I was still in the days when I was content to find out things, and did not long to communicate my discoveries. Moreover, I was used to living in two worlds, a real world and a make-believe one, without ever knowing which was which. In one world I had much company—father and mother and sister and friends—and did as others did, and took everything for granted. In the other world I was all alone, and I had to discover ways for myself; and I was so uncertain that I did not attempt to bring a companion along. And did I find my own father treading in the unknown ways? Then perhaps some day he would come across me, and take me farther than I had yet been; but I would not be the first to whisper that I was there. It seems strange enough to me now that I should have been so uncommunicative; but I remind myself that I have been thoroughly made over, at least once, since those early days.

I recall with sorrow that I was sometimes as weak in morals as I was in religion. I remember stealing a piece of sugar. It was long ago—almost as long ago as anything that I remember. We were still living in my grandfather's house when this dreadful thing happened and I was only four or five years old when we moved from there. Before my mother figured this out for me I scarcely had the courage to confess my sin.

And it was thus: In a corner of a front room, by a window, stood a high chest of drawers. On top of the chest stood a tin box, decorated with figures of queer people with queer flat parasols; a Chinese tea-box, in a word. The box had a lid. The lid was shut tight. But I knew what was in that gorgeous box and I coveted it. I was very little—I never could reach anything. There stood a chair suggestively near the chest. I pushed the chair a little and mounted it. By standing on tiptoe I could now reach the box. I opened it and took out an irregular lump of sparkling sugar. I stood on the chair admiring it. I stood too long. My grandmother came in—or was it Itke, the housemaid?—and found me with the stolen morsel.

I saw that I was fairly caught. How could I hope to escape my captor, when I was obliged to turn on my stomach in order to descend safely, thus presenting my jailer with the most tempting opportunity for immediate chastisement? I took in the situation before my grandmother had found her voice for horror. Did I rub my eyes with my knuckles and whimper? I wish I could report that I was thus instantly struck with a sense of my guilt. I was impressed only with the absolute certainty of my impending doom, and I promptly seized on a measure of compensation. While my captor—I really think it was a grandmother—rehearsed her entire vocabulary of reproach, from a distance sufficient to enable her to hurl her voice at me with the best effect, I stuffed the lump of sugar into my mouth and munched it as fast as I could. And I had eaten it all, and had licked my sticky lips, before the avenging rod came down.

I remember no similar lapses from righteousness, but I sinned in lesser ways more times than there are years in my life. I sinned, and more than once I escaped punishment by some trick or sly speech. I do not mean that I lied outright, though that also I did, sometimes; but I would twist my naughty speech, if forced to repeat it, in such an artful manner, or give such ludicrous explanation of my naughty act, that justice was overcome by laughter and threw me, as often as not, a handful of raisins instead of a knotted strap. If by such successes I was encouraged to cultivate my natural slyness and duplicity, I throw the blame on my unwise preceptors, and am glad to be rid of the burden for once.

I have said that I used to lie. I recall no particular occasion when a lie was the cause of my disgrace; but I know that it was always my habit, when I had some trifling adventure to report, to garnish it up with so much detail and circumstance that nobody who had witnessed my small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted on my version with such fervid conviction. The truth is that everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my visions to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese leading about a lazy goose girl, they went through all sorts of antics before my eyes that fat geese are not known to indulge in. If I met poor Blind Munye with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of wrath overspread his countenance; and I ran home to relate, panting, how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations; but if you insist, I will say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have been much more interesting had they been so.