Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self

MICHAEL P. KRAMER Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self Many [Jews] will never see the Promised Land; and for those who do, cruel will be the suffering before they enter, long and difficult will be the task and process of assimilation and regeneration. Josephine Lazarus1 Men and women who aspire to assimilation with their neighbors, and start out with disloyalty to their own religion, become justly a mark of opprobrium to their own race, and receive scant courtesy at the hands of those whose favor they would curry. Esther J. Ruskay2 And, nevertheless, she was a Jewess—having been born one. Emma WoIP FOR SEVERAL YEARS FOLLOWING its publication to mostly enthusiastic reviews in 1912, Mary Antin's The Promised Land achieved an enviable popular success and earned its author a substantial celebrity. As one admirer later recalled, "Antin was, in those days, the most talked-of PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 121-148 C 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 122MICHAEL P. KRAMER writer—if not the most talked-of woman—in America."4 But from the restrictionist "tribal twenties," which saw her reputation wane, to our multiculturalist "age of dissensus," which is witnessing her revival, very few critics or literary historians paid serious attention to her or to her autobiography.5 In part, of course, the long eclipse was due to the American marginalization of ethnic texts in general: The Promised Land suffered the same fate as, say, The Souls of Black Folk. But unlike Du Bois's cultural-nationalist masterpiece, which commanded over the years a coterie of devoted African American followers, Antin's autobiography failed during that time even to attract Jews. To be sure, Jewish scholars and critics have always been aware of The Promised Land: as the first best-seller written by and about a Jew in America, and as a work of marked literary sophistication as well, its claims upon Jewish-American literary historiography have always been (and continue to be) considerable. But from the very beginning, even during her period of greatest celebrity, Jewish accounts of The Promised Land were often marked by embarrassment and apology, if not by outright contempt. Despite its considerable literary and historical credentials—and despite Antin's assertion that the "core" of her autobiography was its representativeness, that her life was "typical of many" and her story "illustrative of scores of unwritten lives"6—the questionable Jewishness of The Promised Land made the autobiography's claims less than compelling. True, in the first—shtetl—half of the book, Antin paints a largely normative, informed, and appealing account of her Jewish origins: her description of Eastern European folkways is sympathetic (if not uncritical ), and her critique of Russian antisemitism is powerful. But in the second—American—half of her narrative, she (as protagonist) determinedly and vigorously embraces her new cultural home and discards ethnic difference, casting aside the "mummeries, ceremonials, and symbolic accessories" (34) of Judaism as easily as she sheds her "despised immigrant clothing" and changes her "impossible" Hebrew name (149). Indeed, the first half of the book serves largely to foreground and thus underscore the profound personal transformation that becomes manifest in the second half and that she announces at the outset (in quasi-Christian terms, no less) as both the justification and burden of her autobiography: "I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over" (1). She charts her intellectual and spiritual growth through a series of apostasies—the first time she challenges her melamed, the first time she violates the Sabbath, the first time she eats ham, and so on—each backsliding event, a stage in her transformation. The narrative of her progress to American selfhood thus reads as a concurrent, deliberate, enthusiastic retrogression from Jewish origins. Even the autobiographical act itself seems a violation of Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self123 her Jewish identity: invoking the figure of Coleridge's ancient mariner, "who told his tale in order to be rid of it," she explicitly suggests that her primary purpose in recording her life is to "shut the book" on her past, with the intention "never [to] hark...