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18. “The Promised Land,” from The Promised Land (1912)
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18 “The Promised Land,” from The Promised Land (1912) Mary Antin mary antin (1881–1949) was born in the small Russian town of Polotzk in 1881. Her father, a trader constrained by the social and economic circumstances of Czarist rule, immigrated to the United States in 1891, and the rest of the family immigrated three years later with borrowed money. After several failed business attempts, the Antins settled in Boston’s South End, where they lived meagerly on their combined earnings. While her father, mother, and oldest sister worked, Antin was allowed to attend public school in Chelsea, a predominately Jewish suburb. She was a remarkable student, and with much support from her teachers and prominent figures in the Jewish community, in 1899, while still a student, she published her first book of juvenilia— a collection of letters she had written to an uncle that she translated from Yiddish to English. Shortly afterward Antin met geologist Amadeus William Grabau, who was ten years her senior and hailed from a staunchly Lutheran family. Antin’s own educational goal of attending Radcliffe College was thwarted by their marriage, the birth of their daughter, and their 1901 move to New York, where Grabau was offered a position at Columbia University. In New York Antin mingled with intellectuals, including Josephine Lazarus, whose sister, Emma, had written the 356 poem “The New Colossus” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Josephine became Antin’s mentor and introduced her to Emersonian transcendentalism. The Lazarus sisters’ arguments regarding the importance of transcendentalism for thinking about the citizenship of diverse American immigrants, especially women, inspired Antin’s beliefs and writing. Josephine, who had encouraged Antin to write an autobiography, died in 1910, motivating Antin to begin her project. First published as a set of articles in The Atlantic Monthly, and finally collected as The Promised Land in 1912, Antin’s idealistic assimilationist autobiography, in its quest to realize the American Dream, met with critical success and became a bestseller, reprinted thirty-three times. Subsequently, she became a popular speaker on patriotic American themes. In 1914 she published another book, a defense of immigration entitled They Who Knock at the Gates, and actively campaigned to loosen restrictions on immigration. During and after World War I, however, widespread xenophobia and anti-German sentiment made life difficult for Antin and her husband, who ultimately left Columbia University and moved to China, where he died in 1946. These events left Antin devastated. Save for a few articles in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Common Ground, she did not publish again. These articles, however, suggest that Antin, despite the xenophobia of World War I and the anti-Semitism of World War II, maintained her idealistic belief in the relationship of spiritualism to social justice and equality until her death after a lengthy illness in 1949. Antin’s life narrative is now read more critically in the wake of the New American studies, but its delineation of immigrant RussianJewish life remains important for conceptualizing urban American life in the early twentieth century. Antin’s address to the reader as “my American friend,” however, may suggest the anxieties and ambivalence about becoming an American in her immigrant narrative (see Sidonie Smith, “Cheesecake”). The excerpt here comes midway through The Promised Land and narrates the transitional moment when the old world of Russian Polotzk has been left behind and the new world of urban Boston calls for a new kind of identity. - “The Promised Land” 357 [44.204.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:58 GMT) Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1912 To the Memory of Josephine Lazarus Who lives in the fulfillment of her prophecies Chapter IX. The Promised Land Having made such good time across the ocean, I ought to be able to proceed no less rapidly on terra firma, where, after all, I am more at home. And yet here is where I falter. Not that I hesitated, even for the space of a breath, in my first steps in America. There was no time to hesitate. The most ignorant immigrant, on landing, proceeds to give and receive greetings, to eat, sleep, and rise, after the manner of his own country; wherein he is corrected, admonished, and laughed at, whether by interested friends or the most indifferent strangers; and his American experience is thus begun. The process is spontaneous on all sides, like the education of the child by the family circle. But while...