The Jewish Ghetto and the Americanization of Space in Mary Antin and Her Contemporaries

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Congress appointed the Dillingham Commission to investigate the effects of immigration on the U.S. and to make recommendations for future policy. The commission released its 42-volume report on the "immigration question" in 1911. The commission's report judged recent immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, inferior to their predecessors, primarily from northern and western Europe. It also advocated specific immigration restriction policies, including the implementation of literacy tests and country-of-origin quotas, which were adopted in 1917 and 1921, respectively; doubling the head tax on immigrants; increasing the amount of money required in the immigrant's possession at the port of arrival; and writing policies that favored the immigration of men with families.¹ The recommendations were the culmination of anti-immigrant sentiment that had been brewing for decades.

Documents such as the Dillingham Commission report, which told a story of degeneration and decline in the quality of newcomers, were not the only narratives circulating at the time. An alternative account of immigration can be found in Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1911), which challenges the legitimacy and authority of the official report with its own type of Dillingham Commission. In her autobiographical narrative, Antin includes a character named Miss Dillingham, a teacher in the schools of the Boston Ghetto who recognizes the talent and promise of her immigrant pupils and is especially encouraging of Mary, having one of the student's poems printed in a local newspaper as proof of the child's intelligence and aptitude.²

In this essay I read Antin's The Promised Land against nativist narratives, the push for immigration restriction laws, and other turn of the century depictions by immigrant and nonimmigrant writers of the Jewish Ghetto and its inhabitants. I combine an extended discussion of U.S. immigration policy from the years 1882–1924 with an analysis of how Antin, in response to the often heated debate over the immigration question, manipulated a stock, popular literary genre, the immigrant conversion narrative, to achieve particular ends. One of the ways that Antin appropriates this narrative is by eschewing its most common form, immigrant realism, in favor of what I call immigrant romance. The latter frees her from a focus on the harsh economic and social realities that many immigrants faced; the attendant sensory description of the sights, sounds, and smells of the ghettoscape; and the use of dialect. It allows her, primarily through her use of abstraction and metonymy, as I discuss below, to reconfigure the space of the urban ghetto as a site of infinite possibility.

In her narrative, Antin seeks to counter the anti-immigrationist claims of many of her contemporaries, demonstrate the fitness of Russian-Jewish immigrants for U.S. citizenship, and reconceptualize the very notion of "Americanness." Traditionally viewed as a stifling, pestilential space that threatens the surrounding nation, the ghetto for Antin becomes a dynamic space of freedom and openness. She also challenges dominant views of the inhabitants of the ghetto and suggests that immigrants such as herself, individuals devoted to the ideals of liberty and equality and to the ability to improve themselves through education, are not only adequate material for U.S. citizenship but perhaps the "truest" Americans of all.

Reading The Promised Land through the lens of spatial practice illuminates how the story intersects with contemporary narratives on immigration and the United States as a field imaginary: the locus of freedom that was either, depending on one's perspective, contracting or expanding.³ In addition, Antin's depiction of the ghetto transforms the mappable locale, making it not just a static, claustrophobic backdrop but an integral, dynamic, and democratizing site of liberation, for it is her mobility, her success in moving through space, traversing psychological and spatial territories, exceeding boundaries, and taking advantage of the mix and heterogeneity surrounding her in various U.S. metropolises that fosters her Americanization. In other words, a primary way in which Mary achieves independence and becomes an "American" is her ability to cross ostensible barriers, both spatial and...