The Promised Land

by Mary Antin, Werner Sollors (Introduction), Werner Sollors (Noted by)

Overview

For the centennial of its first publication: a new edition of a seminal work on the American immigrant experience

Weaving introspection with political commentary, biography with history, The Promised Land, first published in 1912, brings to life the transformation of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant into an American citizen. Mary Antin recounts "the process of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development that took place in [her] own soul" and reveals the impact of a new culture and new standards of behavior on her family. A feeling of division—between Russia and America, Jews and Gentiles, Yiddish and English—ever-present in her narrative is balanced by insights, amusing and serious, into ways to overcome it. In telling the story of one person, The Promised Land illuminates the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143106777
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/26/2012
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mary Antin was born on June 13, 1881, in Polotzk, Russia, the daughter of Israel and Esther Weltman Antin. Her father emigrated to the United States in 1891, and three years later the mother followed with the four children, arriving in Boston on the Polynesia on May 8, 1894. The Antin family eventually settled on Arlington Street in Chelsea, where Mary and the younger siblings started to go to public school; her older sister had to work as a seamstress. Mary Antin's teacher brought about her first published work, the composition "Snow," in the journal Primary Education.

Shortly after the transatlantic voyage, Mary wrote a long and detailed account of it in Yiddish for her uncle. Later, the philanthropist Hattie Hecht introduced Antin to Philip Cowen and Israel Zangwill, and the result was the publication of an English adaptation of the letter in the American Hebrew. In 1899, it appeared as a book that misspelled the name of her hometown, From Plotzk to Boston, with a glowing introduction by Zangwill. The essayist Josephine Lazarus—Emma Lazarus' sister—reviewed the volume for the Critic and became friends with Antin, who had been admitted to the prestigious Boston Latin School for girls. The family now lived in the Dover Street slum, and Mary associated with the South End Settlement House of Edward Everett Hale. She sat as a model for his daughter Ellen Day Hale, and became a member of the Natural History Club. There she met Amadeus William Grabau (1870-1946), who was finishing his doctoral work in geology and paleontology at Harvard. They were married in Boston on October 5, 1901, and soon took up residence in New York, where Grabau became a professor at Columbia University. Antin never finished Latin School, and therefore could only take a few college courses as a special student. Their dauther, Josephine Esther Grabau, Antin's only child, was born on November 21, 1907. Antin publshed short stories essays, and her books The Promised Land (1912) and They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), which together sold more than one hundred thousand copies. After some successful years as a writer and Progressive lecturer, Antin suffered a nervous breakdown, and she and Grabau separated. She lived in pooer circumstances in later years, publishing little, and died on May 15, 1949.

Werner Sollors is a professor of Afro-American Studies and English at Harvard University. His most recent book is Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER I Within the Pale
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Promised Land"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Mary Antin.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
I. Within the Pale
II. Children of the Law
III. Both Their Houses
IV. Daily Bread
V. I Remember
VI. The Tree of Knowledge
VII. The Boundaries Stretch
VIII. The Exodus
IX. The Promised Land
X. Initiation
XI. "My Country"
XII. Miracles
XIII. A Child's Paradise
XIV. Manna
XV. Tarnished Laurels
XVI. Dover Street
XVII. The Landlady
XVIII. The Burning Bush
XIX. A Kingdom in the Slums
XX. The Heritage
Acknowledgments
Glossary

Reading Group Guide

1. The narrative of The Promised Land is split nearly evenly between an account of Antin's life "within the Pale" (where Jews were geographically confined), in Polotzk, and an account of her life in the United States. What are the significant differences between the community life of Polotzk and that of the poor sections of Boston and Chelsea where Antin lived? What are the differences in perceptions and expectations about community in these two places?

2. When Antin describes Sabbath evenings in Polotzk, she says of the excellence of the cheesecakes that were eaten with supper, "It takes history to make such a cake." What does she mean by this? And what is suggested here about the sense and weight of history to all those who live in Polotzk? What role does history play in the collective identity?

3. Antin's own relationship to the history of her people is of course a complicated one. How do her attitude and feelings about the historical circumstances into which she was born and about her Jewishness change over the course of the book? When Antin arrives in the United States, she was-as she herself says-"made over" through "all the processes of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development [that] took place in [her] own soul." She is faced with her identity's duality: her Jewishness on the one hand, her newfound American citizenship on the other. What are some examples of her grappling with this duality? What do they say, more broadly, about the plight of the immigrant? How does Antin incorporate the American ideals of citizenship, equal opportunity, and freedom into her life?

4. Howare the changing attitudes of Antin's parents toward their religion different from or similar to Antin's own? How do An-tin's and her parents' attitudes toward both the ritualistic and philosophical aspects of Judaism change over the course of her
narrative and through the process of immigration and assimilation?

5. What role does Antin's gender play in the molding of her identity? How does she feel about her place as a woman in Polotzk and, then, in early-twentieth-century America? Can she be considered a protofeminist of some sort, or is she more focused on other aspects of her identity?

6. Throughout her narrative, Antin mentions that her story speaks for many thousands of immigrants who have not, for different reasons, written stories of their own. Antin at one point writes, "The tongue am I of those who lived before me, as those that are to come will be the voice of my unspoken thoughts." What insights do you think Antin's story sheds on questions about immigration and assimilation in modern American society?