The Promised Land quotes

The Tide had rushed in, stealing away our Seaweed Cushions

I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.

Is it not time to write my life's story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell.

Perhaps I have taken needless trouble to furnish an excuse for my autobiography. My age alone, my true age, would be reason enough for my writing.

I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and here am I still, your contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling with your latest thought.

Had I no better excuse for writing, I still might be driven to it by my private needs. It is in one sense a matter of my personal salvation. I was at a most impressionable age when I was transplanted to the new soil.

It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

And I have thought of a charm that should release me from the folds of my clinging past. I take the hint from the Ancient Mariner, who told his tale in order to be rid of it.

So there was a fence around Polotzk, after all. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles. This knowledge came so gradually that it could not shock me. It trickled into my consciousness drop by drop.

By the time I fully understood that I was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to my flesh.

The first time Vanka threw mud at me, I ran home and complained to my mother, who brushed off my dress and said, quite resignedly, "How can I help you, my poor child? Vanka is a Gentile.

The next time Vanka abused me, I did not cry, but ran for shelter, saying to myself, "Vanka is a Gentile." The third time, when Vanka spat on me, I wiped my face and thought nothing at all.

I accepted ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather.

The world was made in a certain way, and I had to live in it.

Tobacco being a source of government revenue, there was a heavy tax on it. Cigarettes were taxed at every step of their process. The tobacco was taxed separately, and the paper, and the mouthpiece, and on the finished product an additional tax was put.

There was no tax on the smoke. The Czar must have overlooked it.

Business really did not pay when the price of goods was so swollen by taxes that the people could not buy. The only way to make business pay was to cheat—cheat the Government of part of the duties.

while a policeman marched behind him, ticking off the days and counting up the hours. That was a foolish fancy, but some of the things that were done in Russia really were very funny.

There were things in Polotzk that made you laugh with one eye and weep with the other, like a clown.

During an epidemic of cholera, the city officials, suddenly becoming energetic, opened stations for the distribution of disinfectants to the people. A quarter of the population was dead when they began, and most of the dead were buried, while some lay decaying in deserted houses.

There he had us cooped up, thousands of us where only hundreds could live, and every means of living taxed to the utmost.

When there are too many wolves in the prairie, they begin to prey upon each other.

We starving captives of the Pale—we did as do the hungry brutes. But our humanity showed in our discrimination between our victims. Whenever we could, we spared our own kind, directing against our racial foes the cunning wiles which our bitter need invented.

It cost nothing to be a Christian; on the contrary, it brought rewards and immunities. To be a Jew was a costly luxury, the price of which was either money or blood. Is it any wonder that we hoarded our pennies?

What his shield is to the soldier in battle, that was the ruble to the Jew in the Pale.

The knowledge of such things as I am telling leaves marks upon the flesh and spirit. I remember little children in Polotzk with old, old faces and eyes glazed with secrets.

Police favor was retailed at a lower price to him than to the Jew. His nature did not compel him to support schools and charities. It cost nothing to be a Christian; on the contrary, it brought rewards and immunities.

To be a Jew was a costly luxury, the price of which was either money or blood.

Is it any wonder that we hoarded our pennies? What his shield is to the soldier in battle, that was the ruble to the Jew in the Pale.

The knowledge of such things as I am telling leaves marks upon the flesh and spirit. I remember little children in Polotzk with old, old faces and eyes glazed with secrets.

I knew how to dodge and cringe and dissemble before I knew the names of the seasons.

And I had plenty of time to ponder on these things, because I was so idle. If they had let me go to school, now—But of course they didn't.

That is the way my fate was sealed. It gives me a shudder of wonder to think what a narrow escape I had;

I came so near not being born at all.

If the beggarly cousin with the frowzy wig had prevailed upon her family and broken off the match, then my mother would not have married my father, and I should at this moment be an unborn possibility in a philosopher's brain.

And at the last, when I stood at the gate of life, a weazen-faced fishwife, who had not wit enough to support herself, came near shutting me out.

Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born.

But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose. Since I have stood on my own feet, I have never met my master. For every time I choose a friend I determine my fate anew.

Even life, that was so difficult to attain, may serve me merely as a wayside inn, if I choose to go on eternally.

However I came here, it is mine to be.

My mother ought to have been happy in her engagement. Everybody congratulated her on securing such a scholar, her parents loaded her with presents, and her friends envied her. It is true that the hossen's family consisted entirely of poor relations;

For while she sympathized with her parents, and felt personally cheated by my father's lack of piety, she thought it was her duty to take her husband's part, even against her parents, in their own house.

My mother was one of those women who always obey the highest law they know, even though it leads them to their doom.

How did it happen that my father, who from his early boyhood had been pointed out as a scholar in embryo, failed to live up to the expectations of his world? It happened as it happened that his hair curled over his high forehead:

I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see poppies in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and leaves me a gray blank. I have nothing against poppies.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality.

And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

I am obstinately positive of some points, and for the rest, you may amend the puzzle if you can. You may make a survey of Polotzk ever so accurate, and show me where I was wrong; still I am the better guide.

You may show that my adventureful road led nowhere, but I can prove, by the quickening of my pulse and the throbbing of my rapid recollections, that things happened to me there or here; and I shall be believed, not you.

And so over the vague canvas of scenes half remembered, half imagined, I draw the brush of recollection, and pick out here a landmark, there a figure, and set my own feet back in the old ways, and live over the old events.

For the space of a wild heartbeat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me.

We are not born all at once, but by bits.

The body first and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth;

But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and die unheard.

It is well that now and then one is born among the simple with a taste for self-revelation.

The man or woman thus endowed must speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.

Nor do I despair of remembering yet, over a dish of corn, the time when I fed on worms; and then I may be able to recall how it felt to be made at last into a man.

Give me to eat and drink, for I crave wisdom.

My winters, while I was a very little girl, were passed in comparative confinement. On account of my delicate health, my grandmother and aunts deemed it wise to keep me indoors;

and this private mortification I set down against old Polotzk, in my long score of grievances and shames.

Fear is a devil hard to cast out.

Let me make the most of the winter adventures that I recall. First, there was sleighing.

to-day the ringing city pavement underfoot, and the buzz of beasts and men in the market place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the lone whinny of scattered mates. How empty the existence of the treadmill horse beside this!

As empty and endless and dull as the life of almost any woman in Polotzk, had I had eyes to see the likeness.

We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished only with benches around the walls. There is no screen or other protection against the drafts rushing in every time the door is opened.

"I am not afraid," I said, in the noble accents of courage. "I am not afraid to go. God goes with me."

Pride goeth before a fall.

On the step outside I slid down into a drift, just on the eve of triumph. They picked me up; they brought me in. They found all of me inside my wrappings. They gave me a piece of sugar and sent me to bed.

Said Zalmen to me, interpreting: "The board looks back and says, 'Log, log, you will not go with me? Then I will go on by myself.'" That boy was called simple, on account of such speeches as this.

I wonder in what language he is writing poetry now.

We had very few toys. Neither Fetchke nor I cared much for dolls. A rag baby apiece contented us, and if we had a set of jackstones we were perfectly happy. Our jackstones, by the way, were not stones but bones.

He was a shepherd before he became a king. I was an ignorant child in the Ghetto, but I was admitted at last to the society of the best; I was given the freedom of all America.

Perhaps the "stuff that dreams are made of" is the same for all dreamers.

When we came to read Genesis I had the great advantage of a complete translation in Yiddish. I faithfully studied the portion assigned in Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the story ends.

second, that her oracles sometimes gave false answers. Did the little inquisitor charge her betrayers with the lie? Magnanimous creature, she kept their falseness a secret, and ceased to probe their shallow depths.

What you would know, find out for yourself: this became our student's motto; and she passed from the question to the experiment.

Her grandmother told her that if she handled "blind flowers" she would be stricken blind. She found by test that the pretty flowers were harmless.

Would it be a storm? Would a sudden bolt strike her? She stood and waited. She could not bring her hand to her pocket again, but she felt that it bulged monstrously. She stood with no thought of moving again.

Where were the thunders of Jehovah?

No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue—not even "Hear, O Israel." She felt that she was in direct communication with God—awful thought!—and He would read her mind and would send His answer.

I am a thinking animal. Things are as important to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible to me than a cricket far off in the field.

The earth was my mother, the earth is my teacher.

I am a dutiful pupil: I listen ever with my ear close to her lips. It seems to me I do not know a single thing that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal senses.

and you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that godlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important to me as ideas.

I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body.

There are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother, the earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil:

Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.

Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land.

But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year—in America!" So there was our promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West.

But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not "May we be next year in Jerusalem," but "Next year—in America!"

So there was our promised land, and many faces were turned towards the West.

And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought.

WINTER SCENE ON THE DVINAToList

I had a direct way in everything. I rushed right in—I spoke right out.

My mother sent me sometimes to deliver a package of tea, and I was proud to help in business. One day I went across the Dvina and far up "the other side."

aye, to every faded petticoat found hanging in the wardrobe. These goods, comprising all our possessions and all our tenant's, would presently be removed, to be sold at auction, for the benefit of the creditor.

Lame chairs and faded petticoats, when they are the last one has, have a vital value in the owner's eyes.

My mother moved about, weeping distractedly, all the while the officers were in the house. The frightened children cried. Our neighbors gathered to bemoan our misfortune.

So at last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last!

The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out for every star.

The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, "America! America!"

But his ruse failed of success. Half of Polotzk was at my uncle's gate in the morning, to conduct us to the railway station, and the other half was already there before we arrived.

The procession resembled both a funeral and a triumph.

The women wept over us, reminding us eloquently of the perils of the sea, of the bewilderment of a foreign land, of the torments of homesickness that awaited us.

Then the station became invisible, and the shining tracks spun out from sky to sky.

I was in the middle of the great, great world, and the longest road was mine.

Memory may take a rest while I copy from a contemporaneous document the story of the great voyage. In accordance with my promise to my uncle, I wrote, during my first months in America, a detailed account of our adventures between Polotzk and Boston.

with never a sign of the free world beyond our barred windows; with anxiety and longing and homesickness in our hearts, and in our ears the unfamiliar voice of the invisible ocean, which drew and repelled us at the same time.

The fortnight in quarantine was not an episode; it was an epoch, divisible into eras, periods, events.

The greatest event was the arrival of some ship to take some of the waiting passengers. When the gates were opened and the lucky ones said good-bye, those left behind felt hopeless of ever seeing the gates open for them.

It was I that ran away, on winged feet of joy and expectation; it was she whose feet were bound in the treadmill of daily toil.

And I was so blind that I did not see that the glory lay on her, and not on me.

was not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father's best English could not convey.

I think she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.

It is not worth while to refer to voluminous school statistics to see just how many "green" pupils entered school last September, not knowing the days of the week in English, who next February will be declaiming patriotic verses in honor of George Washington and …

for thus America came to be the country I love so dearly. I am glad, most of all, that the Americans began by being Englishmen, for thus did I come to inherit this beautiful language in which I think.

It seems to me that in any other language happiness is not so sweet, logic is not so clear.

I am not sure that I could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought about them in un-English words. I could almost say that my conviction of immortality is bound up with the English of its promise.

and when at last I could say "village" and "water" in rapid alternation, without misplacing the two initials, that memorable word was sweet on my lips. For we had conquered, and Teacher was pleased.

Getting a language in this way, word by word, has a charm that may be set against the disadvantages. It is like gathering a posy blossom by blossom.

Bring the bouquet into your chamber, and these nasturtiums stand for the whole flaming carnival of them tumbling over the fence out there; these yellow pansies recall the velvet crescent of color glowing under the bay window;

But now, as I read my own words, in a delicious confusion, the idea was born.

I stared at my name: Mary Antin. Was that really I?

The printed characters composing it seemed strange to me all of a sudden.

And so what is there left for me to do, who do not have to drive a horse nor interpret ancient lore, but put my grandfather's question into words and set to music my father's dream?

The tongue am I of those who lived before me, as those that are to come will be the voice of my unspoken thoughts.

And so who shall be applauded if the song be sweet, if the prophecy be true?

Saintliness had a new incarnation in about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that mischief was much more fun than piety.

Goodness, as I had known it, was respectable, but not necessarily admirable.

The people I really admired, like my Uncle Solomon, and Cousin Rachel, were those who preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks.

I did respect the saints, but I could not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it, was respectable, but not necessarily admirable.

The people I really admired, like my Uncle Solomon, and Cousin Rachel, were those who preached the least and laughed the most.

My sister Frieda was perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be downright good if one really wanted to.

and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was set down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love her new country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a great worship.

Naturalization, with us Russian Jews, may mean more than the adoption of the immigrant by America. It may mean the adoption of America by the immigrant.

On the day of the Washington celebration I recited a poem that I had composed in my enthusiasm. But "composed" is not the word. The process of putting on paper the sentiments that seethed in my soul was really very discomposing.

It was not much of a voice; like my hollow cheeks, it suggested consumption. My pronunciation was faulty, my declamation flat. But I had the courage of my convictions.

I was face to face with twoscore Fellow Citizens, in clean blouses and extra frills.

I must tell them what George Washington had done for their country—for our country—for me.

Consciously or unconsciously, I have always acted on the motto of a wise man who was one of the dearest friends that Boston kept for me until I came. "

Personal presence moves the world,

" said the great Dr. Hale; and I went in person to beard the editor in his armchair.

But after I discovered the public library I was not impatient for the reopening of school. The library did not open till one o'clock in the afternoon, and each reader was allowed to take out only one book at a time.

Long before one o'clock I was to be seen on the library steps, waiting for the door of paradise to open.

I spent hours in the reading-room, pleased with the atmosphere of books, with the order and quiet of the place, so unlike anything on Arlington Street.

So do not laugh at the little boy playing at soldiers, if he tells you he is going to hew the world into good behavior when he gets to be a man.

And do, by all means, write my name in the book of fame, saying, She was one who aspired.

For that, in condensed form, is the story of the lives of the great.

I was not alone on this tour of inspection. I was attended by a trusty escort.

But I brought soap and water with me. I am applying them now.

I found no fault with Wheeler Street when I was fourteen years old. On the contrary, I pronounced it good.

The improvidence of the poor is a most distressing spectacle to all right-minded students of sociology. But please spare me your homily this time. It does not apply.

The poor are the poor in spirit. Those who are rich in spiritual endowment will never be found bankrupt.

Graduation Day was nothing less than a triumph for me. It was not only that I had two pieces to speak, one of them an original composition;

Ask rather, What was it not?

Dover Street was my fairest garden of girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on a broad avenue of life.

Dover Street was a prison, a school of discipline, a battlefield of sordid strife. The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors of degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled through, whispering of infinite things.

Turn down any street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and endurance.

Every one of those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged humanity, and it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of soapsuds to clean it out.

Dover Street is intersected, near its eastern end, where we lived, by Harrison Avenue. That street is to the South End what Salem Street is to the North End. It is the heart of the South End ghetto, for the greater part of its length;

The woman has an endless, inglorious struggle with the pest; her triumphs are too petty for applause, her failures too mean for notice. Care, to the man, is a hound to be kept in leash and mastered.

To the woman, care is a secret parasite that infects the blood.

Mrs. Hutch, of course, was only one symptom of the disease of poverty, but there were times when she seemed to me the sharpest tooth of the gnawing canker. Surely as sorrow trails behind sin, Saturday evening brought Mrs. Hutch. The landlady did not trail.

Mrs. Hutch actually stopped, and I jumped into the pause.

"I'm seventeen," I said quickly, "and I feel like seventy."

This was too much, even for me who had spoken. I had not meant to say the last. It broke out, like my wicked laugh. I was afraid, if I stayed any longer, Mrs. Hutch would have the apoplexy;

Of course we were great friends after that, and this is the way my troubles often ended on Dover Street.

To bump into a wooden Indian was to bump into good luck, a hundred times a week.

No wonder I was happy most of the time.

I brought the debating-club into my story just to show how naturally the children of the slums drift toward their salvation, if only some island of safety lies in the course of their innocent activities.

Not a child in the slums is born to be lost. They are all born to be saved, and the raft that carries them unharmed through the perilous torrent of tenement life is the child's unconscious aspiration for the best.

But there must be lighthouses to guide him midstream.

Did I not say it was my palace?

Mine, because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine, though I lived on Dover Street. My palace—mine!

I loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out.

All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—I and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning.

It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours.

I visited every part of the building that was open to the public. I spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. I repeated to myself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail.

That I who was brought up to my teens almost without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that ever were written was a miracle as great as any on record.

That an outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell in a palace—this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung.

Surely I was rocked in an enchanted cradle.

The grocer weighed me out a quarter of a pound of butter, and when the scales were even he threw in another scrap. "Na!" he said, smiling across the counter, "you can carry that much around the corner!"

Plainly he was showing me that if I have not as many houses as my neighbor, that should not prevent me from cultivating as many graces.

If I made some shame-faced reference to the unpaid balance, Mr. Rosenblum replied, "I guess you're not thinking of running away from Boston yet. You haven't finished turning the libraries inside out, have you?"

A glowing life has been mine, and the fires that blazed highest in all my days were kindled on Dover Street.

I have never had a dull hour in my life; I have never had a livelier time than in the slums.

In all my troubles I was thrilled through and through with a prophetic sense of how they were to end. A halo of romance floated before every to-morrow; the wings of future adventures rustled in the dead of night.

My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet.

I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.

One of the inherent disadvantages of premature biography is that it cannot go to the natural end of the story. This difficulty threatened me in the beginning, but now I find I do not need to tax my judgment to fix the proper stopping-place.