Excerpt

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The
Paradox of Immigration

Autobiographies of Alienation and Assimilation: Mary Antin and
Anzia Yezierska

"I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over." So did Mary
Antin begin the chronicle of her experiences as an immigrant in the
New World. So extraordinary were the changes that Antin underwent
after she emigrated as a young girl from Russian Poland to America
that she felt she had experienced the creation of a "second self"
completely divorced from her earlier life.

Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, published in 1912,
became an immediate best-seller, catapulting its author to national
fame and establishing her as the creator of one of the first great
works of American Jewish literature. By the time of Antin's death
in 1949, The Promised Land had gone through thirty-four
editions, becoming one of the most popular immigrant
autobiographies of all time. A classic tale of assimilation, hope,
and transformation, it spoke to the imagination of diverse
immigrant groups, as well as to native-born Americans who saw it as
proof of the inclusiveness of the American dream.

Antin's book was one of more than a dozen accounts of immigrant
life in the new land written in English by Jewish women. The large
number of these works published by American presses is striking,
considering that almost all of their authors were unknown, and that
for most of them, English was a second language. What made them
appealing was the universality of their theme--the encounter with
America. Each author wrote about her personal struggle to respond
to the hardships and opportunities of American life by creating a
new, distinctly American self. Autobiography became a means for
them to assess their experience as immigrants confronting a new
culture and, by writing about their struggles, to impose order on
events that were disruptive and confusing.

It is significant that the first and most influential account of
Eastern European immigrant experience was written by Antin, a
woman. For Jewish women even more than for Jewish men, America
offered a revolutionary opportunity to transcend the limits of the
Old World. This hope is reflected in Antin's pioneering book and in
the works of another autobiographer and fiction writer, Anzia
Yezierska: in both women's stories, the cultural myth of American
freedom merges with the triumph of a woman's autonomy.

For Jewish women, however, the act of writing was at once
liberating and dangerous. Traditional Jewish culture assigned the
tasks of textual study and literary creation solely to men; women
who assumed such roles challenged traditional gender divisions and
religious identities. Thus, in winning the right to independent
"American" womanhood, immigrant writers like Antin and Yezierska
had to engage in a fierce battle with their heritage, one quite
different from that experienced by immigrant men. For some female
immigrants, becoming a writer would require figuratively killing
their Jewish fathers or husbands and the Jewish religion itself,
forces that they saw as linked in their patriarchal domination of
women's lives.

Both Antin and Yezierska describe contradictory feelings of triumph
and loss engendered by their complex identities as Jews, new
Americans, and women. Their stories help us understand immigration
as an inward journey that took new immigrants as far from the
biblical ideal of the woman of valor as from the shtetls and towns
of the Russian plains. Through their imaginations, immigrant Jewish
daughters recreated themselves as American Jewish women, breaking
with tradition and offering the public its first glimpse of the
immigrant Jewish woman as modern feminist.

New World Princess Mary Antin was born in Polotzk, Russia, in June
1881, three months after the assassination of Czar Alexander II
triggered a series of violent pogroms that spread to hundreds of
communities throughout the Pale of Settlement. The following year,
the passage of the May Laws prohibiting Jewish settlement in
villages drove a half-million Jews from rural areas and signalled
the end of the shtetl in the Pale. The May Laws also
drastically reduced Jewish quotas at gymnasia and universities, and
restricted many Jews from holding jobs. As conditions worsened,
more and more Jews fled to America. While the Jewish population of
the United States numbered only about 250,000 in 1880, by 1924,
when Congress passed legislation restricting immigration from
Eastern Europe, approximately one-third of the Jewish population of
Eastern Europe had emigrated to America. The Jewish population of
the United States, merely 3 percent of world Jewry in 1880, by then
numbered four million--almost one-quarter of the world's
Jews.7

The journey to America required extraordinary courage and
resilience. At every step of the way, the migrants were beset by
harrowing, bewildering, and dangerous challenges. Antin described
her family's passage to America in 1894 in a series of letters to
an uncle who had remained in Eastern Europe; the letters, published
in book form five years later, recount frightening encounters with
border patrols, travels in crowded trains through the vast expanse
of Europe, and rough conditions in steerage crossing the
Atlantic.

Little more than a decade later, when Antin was barely thirty, she
wrote her autobiography, not because she had "accomplished
anything" but because she believed her life was representative of
other New World immigrants. Writing also brought Antin "personal
salvation," taking her on a "double voyage of discovery" that
explored her inner transformations as well as "the new outer
universe" of America. "All the processes of uprooting,
transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development took
place in my own soul" she acknowledged, as well as in the physical
world; her book would describe the literal and spiritual journey by
which she had explored these dual realms.

Antin opened her memoirs with a stark portrait of Russia as the
"Egypt" from which Jews had made their exodus to the promised land
of America. Their journey to the United States--and Antin's own
transformation into a liberated, assimilated, secular
woman--ironically became an act of spiritual deliverance tied to
Jewish history. Suffering from the sharp divisions that separated
the Pale from the rest of Russia, Jews from Gentiles, men from
women, Antin spent her childhood manacled by the dual shackles of
sexism and anti-Semitism. Though she rejected Judaism's "medieval"
superstitions, she took pride in its "living seed"--the inward
belief that "God was, had been, and ever would be."

I
was fed on dreams, instructed by means of prophecies, trained to
hear and see mystical things that callous senses could not
perceive. I was taught to call myself a princess, in memory of my
forefathers who had ruled a nation. . . . Sat upon by brutal
enemies, unjustly hated, annihilated a hundred times, I yet arose
and held my head high, sure that I should find my kingdom in the
end. . . . God needed me and I needed Him, for we two together had
a work to do, according to an ancient covenant between him and my
forefathers.

Long after she had renounced the practice of Judaism, she retained
the spiritual attachments of her childhood.

Antin associated this childhood religion with memories of her
mother's magical lullabies and stories of Biblical heroines: "I
heard the names of Rebecca, Rachel and Leah as early as the names
of father, mother, and nurse." Yet matriarchal heroines proved
insufficient guides to a religious faith that privileged
patriarchy; Antin's observant mother, "bred to submission" even
though she was her husband's equal business partner, took her
religion on her husband's authority. Antin angrily acknowledged
that the problem lay in a religious culture that celebrated
maleness: the birth of sons was celebrated with ritual ceremonies
and feasts; boys were sent to learn Torah in cheder
(elementary religious school); even at table, boys were served
first because "nothing was too good for them." In Antin's short
story "Malinke's Atonement," the shtetl mother asks, "What
are daughters worth? They're only good to sit in the house, a
burden on their parents' neck, until they're married off. A son, at
least, prays for the souls of his parents when they're dead; it's a
deed of piety to raise sons."

In this story, nine-year-old Malinke is a renegade who outrages her
mother by challenging traditional customs and the notion that
"girls don't need to know things out of books."1The reward for the
purity of her own faith, the promise of an education, came to Antin
herself only after her own exodus from the Old World. In Russia,
despite the liberal attitudes of her own family, it had been
impossible for her to receive the gift of sustained learning
equivalent to that received by Jewish boys. For women,
education really had no place. A girl was "finished" when she could
read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by 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 wohl
gelehrent--well educated. Antin knew, however, that without
education, women were destined to a life without aspiration, as
"empty and endless and dull" as a "treadmill horse."

In America, Antin was at last able to obtain the education she had
dreamed about. The Promised Land describes in glowing terms the
opportunities available to ambitious immigrants when given access
to free schools, free libraries, and citizenship unrestricted by
race, religion, and ethnicity. Even in the midst of poverty, such
advantages offered a route out of the ghetto and into American
prosperity.

In fact, like many younger children, Antin was permitted to attend
school only because her older sister, Fetchke (called Frieda
in America), had gone to work in a sweatshop to help support the
family. All that the future held for Frieda was an arranged
marriage and domestic drudgery, yet she and her mother gave
unstintingly of their labor to allow Antin the chance to attend
school.

Within six months, she had completed the first five grades; one of
her teachers was so impressed with her talent that only a few
months after Antin enrolled, she sent an essay the girl had written
(entitled "Snow") to an educational journal, which published it.
Antin's literary prowess came to the attention of several board
members at the Hebrew Industrial School, a training institute for
immigrant boys and girls, who introduced her to Lina Hecht, a
German Jewish philanthropist. With Hecht's help, a translator and
publisher were found for the letters Antin had written in Yiddish
describing the family's emigration. The result, From Plotzk to
Boston, was published in 1899 when Antin was only eighteen, with an
introduction by Israel Zangwill, the distinguished British Zionist
(Plotzk being a printer's misspelling of Antin's birthplace).

Because of this astonishing success and the intervention of her
German Jewish mentors, Antin's family allowed her to enroll at
Boston Latin School for Girls, a public preparatory school for
Radcliffe College. Antin also became active at Hale House, the
South End settlement sponsored by the literary notable Edward
Everett Hale, who joined Mary's coterie of admirers.

Even more important to her was Emma Lazarus's sister Josephine, who
became acquainted with Antin after reviewing From Plotzk to Boston.
Lazarus became Antin's friend and mentor. The two women shared a
spiritual sensibility: together they probed the origins of the
universe, the meaning of life, questions of immortality and the
soul. Taken with the younger woman's insights, Lazarus urged her to
continue writing. Encouraged by such friends Antin prospered, even
as her family, its fortunes continuing to decline, was forced to
move from one desperate tenement to another. Unable to master
English or maintain a steady income, Antin's father became bitterly
disillusioned. Contemplating her mother's and sister's constant
labors, Antin was reminded again of the "treadmill horse" of
shtetl days; only she had escaped the hardships that
afflicted the family even in the promised land.

While Antin's narrative acknowledges her family's poverty, she
emphasizes her own success as the product of talent and America's
"open workshop"; she writes that only a "certain class of aliens"
could make use of her new country's freedoms. "I had only to be
worthy and it came to me . . . my friendships, my advantages and
disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the
materials out of which I built my after life. . . ." Ignoring the
economic forces that exploited immigrant workers, Antin never
joined the protests that other immigrant women helped initiate.
Instead she emphasized her own rise as an individual in the Gentile
world: "Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to
lie at my feet. . . . I was a princess waiting to be led to the
throne."

Focusing on her own intellectual and moral worthiness, Antin
glosses over her sister's contributions to her success, stating
only in passing that the true "glory" belonged to Frieda. She also
minimizes the unusual connections to the philanthropists who helped
her. At least one Jewish reviewer resented Antin's portrayal. "To
me," wrote Harry Saltpeter in The Menorah Journal in 1919,
"[Antin] reveals herself as a smug, parvenu snob of the East Side,
the sycophantic protégée of the nice and respectable
persons who patronized her, a person to whom the East Side existed
as inspiration for her writing moods."

Yet most reviewers focused on the apparent universality of her
story rather than on the exemplary and privileged achievements of
Antin as heroine. "The argument for immigration . . . is implicit
in every chapter of 'The promised land,' " wrote the New York
Times critic. Few noted its ambiguities regarding questions of
class relations or ethnic and religious attachments.

Like
many immigrants who quickly Americanized, Antin had given up her
religious customs almost immediately. For the God of her fathers,
she substituted a worship of American heroes like George
Washington. Later she believed that she might not have been so
ready "to put away my religion" if its truths had not been cloaked
in "motley rags of formalism." At the time, though, she felt
"absolutely, eternally, delightfully emancipated from the yoke of
indefensible superstition"; this was for her the essence of
Americanism.

In hindsight, however, Antin recognized the high cost of the
family's liberation from tradition (even her mother--an Orthodox
woman for whom religion was "interwoven with her soul"--gave up
Judaic practices within half a dozen years). Without a system of
American ethics to replace the family's religious orthodoxy, "chaos
took the place of system; uncertainty, inconsistency undermined
discipline," and the Antin family, "formerly united and happy,"
disintegrated.

In her book, Antin wondered whether her father regretted his early,
violent rejection of Judaism, and in later years, missed his
heritage and community; she asks "to what, in short, his
emancipation amounted." Did her family's abandonment of its faith
mean that, in the interest of Americanism, they had forever
alienated their descendants from Judaism? Such a trajectory was
double-edged: while assimilation was the most "hopeful" course for
the Jews, and the most inevitable, Antin felt at the same time that
"nothing more pitiful" could be written in the annals of the
Jews.

Readers may have passed over this cautious note because the
"official" story in The Promised Land is one of celebration
and optimism; Antin's concerns about religious decline and the
debilitating effects of poverty on immigrant families appear as
ambiguous subtexts. The central narrative of the book describes the
emergence of "I, a new being," a self "absolutely other" than the
heroine whose development she recounts in the memoir--the young
Russian girl ("she") who is gradually transformed into an American.
But Antin's authorial voice stands outside this story of
Americanization, revealing that despite her chronicle of triumphant
change, Antin continued to see herself as other, an immigrant aware
of the struggles of her impoverished neighborhood, a Jew worried
about her family's loss of faith, a woman unsure of future
possibilities for her gender.
At the beginning and end of the book, Antin acknowledges that she
is split off from her authentic, historic self, and indeed, that
she wants to distance herself from history overall. "The Wandering
Jew in me seeks forgetfulness," she writes, although she admits
that "I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to
forget . . . I want to be now of to-day." Only by recording and
reinventing her story could Antin expunge her ethnic heritage, her
foreignness, her family's poverty: the enormous pain of transition.
Unable to obliterate memory, it is through storytelling that Antin
can abandon the past.

Antin ends her book by portraying herself as a "human creature,
emerging from the dim places where the torch of history has never
been." Such a person, embodying Antin's vision of herself as a
contemporary intellectual woman, born in the "Middle Ages" and
living in the twentieth century, was not "tied to the monumental
past, any more than my feet were bound to my grandfather's house
below the hill . . . the past was only my cradle, and now it cannot
hold me, because I am grown too big."

She concludes this reverie on a note of high romantic rhetoric,
calling forth the "shining future" she saw in America. Yet this
vision comes out of Antin's frank admission of how painful it is to
be "consciously part of two worlds"--Russia and the United States,
Christian and Jewish, her old and new selves. Rather than
assimilating her past to her new identity, she constructs an
American persona that can move forward only by disconnecting from
the past. Invoking the image of the Ancient Mariner who told his
tale in order to be rid of it, Antin tells her tale--"for once, and
never hark back any more. I will write a bold Finis at the end, and
shut the book with a bang!"

Antin's words reveal her almost desperate wish to jettison the
albatross of memory that weighed so heavily upon her and from which
she was not yet free. But in her real life, as opposed to her
representation of it in The Promised Land, it was not so
easy to say "finis" to the past. For the next several
decades, Antin wrestled with the problem of living her life
according to her vision of herself as "an American among Americans
. . . a daughter of Israel and a child of the universe," a woman of
the present not tied to history.

In 1901, when she was twenty, Antin had married Amadeus William
Grabau, a geologist whom she had met on a field trip he was
conducting for the Boston Society of Natural History. Eleven years
Antin's senior, Grabau, the son of a German-born Lutheran minister,
dazzled her with his research into evolution. Science now replaced
the theological bent that had, since childhood, made Antin question
the mysteries of the universe. But her marriage to a non-Jew
displeased Antin's supporters; in a letter, she admitted that
although she hadn't "changed [her] faith," all of her devoted
friends fell away.

The couple moved to New York, where Antin took courses at Barnard
and later at Teachers College; in 1907, she gave birth to her only
child, Josephine Esther, named after Antin's beloved friend
Josephine Lazarus and her mother, Esther Weltman Antin. Lazarus's
death in 1910 spurred Antin to begin writing her autobiography, as
Lazarus had urged. She published its first installments in The
Atlantic Monthly in 1911. The publication of The Promised
Land the following year brought Antin immediate success.
Reissues as well as fees from lectures Antin gave on such topics as
"The Responsibility of American Citizenship," "The Civic Education
of the Immigrant," and "the Public School as a Test of American
Faith" assured her a substantial income for several years after the
book's debut.

In 1914, Antin published her third and last book, They Who Knock
At Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. At a time when
the sentiment for restrictions on immigration was growing, the book
was a passionate plea for the continuation of unrestricted
admission to newcomers, arguing that the ethics of American
democracy as well as the Ten Commandments demanded an open door
policy. In calling her work a "gospel," Antin indicated that the
subject of immigration was of vital concern to Christians as well
as Jews; she also unwittingly revealed her drift away from
Judaism.
Antin never tempered her support of assimilation, arguing that in
the United States, where cultural tolerance, social equality, and
freedom of choice held sway, more narrowly based ethnic and
national group identities were throwbacks to an archaic age. Yet
Antin's fervent Americanism did not conflict with Zionism. However
much Jewish life became absorbed within American life, she insisted
that the "community of sentiment," "culture," and "memories" of the
Jewish people could survive as emblems of Jewish nationality.
Influenced by her mentor Josephine Lazarus and her good friend
Jessie Sampter, a Zionist writer, Antin urged all Jews to work for
the creation of a national homeland, an idea then unpopular with
most middle-class Jews.

Antin had more difficulty maintaining unity in her personal life
than she did among her varied public concerns. The agonies of World
War I split the Grabau household, with Antin lecturing around the
country on behalf of the Allies and Grabau supporting Germany. As
Antin's daughter Josephine recalled, "We fought the World War right
in our house in Scarsdale. Mother was for the Allies and Father was
for the Germans. Mother hung the Allied flag out her study window
and Father put the German flag out his study window. They fought
the war upstairs and downstairs, into the attic and into the
cellar. It was too much for me and I fell apart. They saw what they
were doing to me and finally agreed to separate for my sake."

After the Grabaus separated in 1918, William Grabau left for China,
where he taught paleontology until his death. Josephine was sent to
boarding school, while Antin's sister Frieda, who had managed the
Grabau household after her own arranged marriage broke up, moved in
with another relative. Despondent about the rising xenophobic trend
in American life and the breakup of her marriage, Antin suffered
from recurring physical ailments and an apparent nervous breakdown
from which she never recovered. After more than a decade of
depression and wandering, she wrote to a friend in 1930, "I have so
little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever go I trail
storm clouds of drama around me." Unable to find a home, she
journeyed from one rehabilitative facility for nervous invalids to
another, often following the spiritual ministrations of such gurus
as Shri Meher Baba, an Eastern mystic. After a few years at the
Austin Riggs Psychiatric Center, she wound up at the Gould Farm in
Monterey, Massachusetts, a Christian restorative community for the
mentally ill. Antin lived there periodically from 1922 until her
death in 1949, becoming a fervent follower of "Brother Will" Gould
and his wife Agnes, and their philosophy of Christian love.

Though Antin wrote only a few essays in the remaining quarter
century of her life, she collected a vast amount of material for a
proposed book on Will Gould, intending to relate his life and work
to the story of Jesus and the Christian community through the ages.
That she never completed the book was a source of pain and
embarrassment to her, an indication of her "long ordeal of
nonperformance." Near the end of her life Antin explained to Agnes
Gould that her decades-long "silence and inactivity" were products
of the "deep soul sickness" and "loneliness" that were much worse
than all the "external illnesses" from which she suffered.

Even at the Christian home, where Antin was both patient and
sometime secretary, she turned "Jew on occasion," describing
herself as a "Jewish member of the staff" and showing sensitivity
to references to Jews. For Antin, there was no inconsistency
between affiliating herself with Will Gould's philosophy of
Christian brotherhood and identifying herself, when necessary, as a
Jew. "One current of continuity runs underneath all the abortive
phases of my life," she explained while in her fifties. "From
childhood on I have been obliged to drop anything I was doing to
run after any man who seemed to know a little more than I did about
God . . . I most want to write about: how a modern woman has sought
the face of God--not the name nor the fame but the face of God--and
what adventures came to meet her on this most ancient human path."
That Antin would boldly declare her ambition to encounter God's
visage, which according to Hebrew Scripture was seen only by Moses,
indicates the distance she had already traveled from Orthodox
Judaism, creating her own defiant spirituality . . .

Copyright© 2000 by Olaf Olafsson

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