" THE TONGUE AM I OF THOSE who lived before me, as those that are to come will be the voice of my unspoken thoughts," 1 proclaims Mary Antin, in an adopted tongue, English, that supplanted the Yiddish of her childhood in Polotzk. One of the most vocal of those who were to come is Eva Hoffman, who was also thirteen when she, too, left her native Cracow and then left her native language to write about her life? seventy-seven years after Antin's book appeared. 2 In The Promised hand, Antin recounts how an anxious Jewish girl from a shtetl in the Russian Pale became an ostensibly sanguine Amer ican woman. That transformation is conceived largely through language, the novice Anglophonic author's proudly won ability to" think in English without an accent." 3 Antin's autobiography is in effect a linguistic palimpsest, an elaboration and reconception of an extensive letter that a precocious fourteen-year-old wrote in Yiddish to her maternal uncle, Moshe Hayyim Weltman, across the Atlantic, then translated into English and published, as From Plotzk to Boston (1899), 4 when she was eighteen. However, the final English version, published as The Promised Land in 1912, obscures its author's ordeal of translingualism, 5 the fearful process of acquiring and articulating a new self through a new language. The Promised Land both embodies and celebrates Yiddish-speaking Mashinke's metamorphosis into Mary, the young woman who conquers Boston through English," this beautiful language in which I think." 6 It is the tongue she praises without a trace of treason, of guilt over abandon ing her mama loshen. In the public school in which the young immigrant