Then came the sixteen days on the big ship, when Mashke was too ill part of the time even to think about America. But there were better days, when the coming of morning found her near the rail gazing at the path of light that led across the shimmering waves into the heart of the golden sky. That way seemed like her own road ahead into the new life that awaited her.
The golden path really began at a Boston public school. Here Mashke stood in her new American dress of stiff calico and gave a new American name to the friendly teacher of the primer class. Mary Antin she was called from that day, all superfluous foreign letters being dropped off forever. As her father tried in his broken English to tell the teacher something of his hopes for his children, Mary knew by the look in his eyes that he, too, had a vision of the path of light. The teacher also saw that glowing, consecrated look and in a flash of insight comprehended something of his starved past and the future for which he longed. In his effort to make himself understood he talked with his hands, with his shoulders, with his eyes; beads of perspiration stood out on his earnest brow, and now he dropped back helplessly into Yiddish, now into Russian. "I cannot now learn what the world knows; I must work. But I bring my children—they go to school for me. I am American citizen; I want my children be American citizens."
The first thing was, of course, to make a beginning with the new language. Afterward when Mary Antin was asked to describe the way the teacher had worked with her foreign class she replied with a smile, "I can't vouch for the method, but the six children in my own particular group (ranging in age from six to fifteen—I was then twelve) attacked the see-the-cat and look-at-the-hen pages of our primers with the keenest zest, eager to find how the common world looked, smelled, and tasted in the strange speech, and we learned!" There was a dreadful time over learning to say the without making a buzzing sound; even mastering the v's and w's was not so hard as that. It was indeed a proud day for Mary Antin when she could say "We went to the village after water," to her teacher's satisfaction.
How Mary Antin loved the American speech! She had a native gift for language, and gathered the phrases eagerly, lovingly, as one gathers flowers, ever reaching for more and still more. She said the words over and over to herself with shining eyes as the miser counts his gold. Soon she found that she was thinking in the beautiful English way. When she had been only four months at school she wrote a composition on Snow that her teacher had printed in a school journal to show this foreign child's wonderful progress in the use of the new tongue. Here is a bit of that composition:
Now the trees are bare, and no flowers are to see in the fields and gardens (we all know why), and the whole world seems like a-sleep without the happy bird songs which left us till spring. But the snow which drove away all these pretty and happy things, try (as I think) not to make us at all unhappy; they covered up the branches of the trees, the fields, the gardens and houses, and the whole world looks like dressed in a beautiful white—instead of green—dress, with the sky looking down on it with a pale face....
At the middle of the year the child who had entered the primer class in September without a word of English was promoted to the fifth grade. She was indeed a proud girl when she went home with her big geography book making a broad foundation for all the rest of the pile, which she loved to carry back and forth just because it made her happy and proud to be seen in company with books.
"Look at that pale, hollow-chested girl with that load of books," said a kindly passer-by one day. "It is a shame the way children are overworked in school these days."
The child in question, however, would have had no basis for understanding the chance sympathy had she overheard the words. Her books were her dearest joy. They were indeed in a very real sense her only tangible possessions. All else was as yet "the stuff that dreams are made of." As she walked through the dingy, sordid streets her glorified eyes looked past the glimpses of unlovely life about her into a beautiful world of her own. If she felt any weight from the books she carried it was just a comfortable reminder that this new Mary Antin and the new life of glorious opportunity were real.
When she climbed the two flights of stairs to her wretched tenement her soul was not soiled by the dirt and squalor through which she passed. As she eagerly read, not only her school history but also every book she could find in the public library about the heroes of America, she did not see the moldy paper hanging in shreds from the walls or the grimy bricks of the neighboring factory that shut out the sunlight. Her look was for the things beyond the moment—the things that really mattered. How could the child feel poor and deprived when she knew that the city of Boston was hers!
As she walked every afternoon past the fine, dignified buildings and churches that flanked Copley Square to the imposing granite structure that held all her hero books, she walked as a princess into her palace. Could she not read for herself the inscription at the entrance: Public Library—Built by the People—Free to All—? Now she stood and looked about her and said, "This is real. This all belongs to these wide-awake children, these fine women, these learned men—and to me."