Mary Antin

Mary Antin

June 13, 1881-May 15, 1949

Name: Mary Antin

Nationality: American; Russian
Ethnicity: Jewish

Genre(s): Short stories; Autobiographies; Novels; Essays

Biographical and Critical Essay
The Promised Land
From Plotzk to Boston
"Malinke's Atonement"
"The Amulet"
"The Lie"
"First Aid to the Alien"
"A Woman to Her Fellow Citizens"
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration
"The Soundless Trumpet"
"House of the One Father"
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

From Plotzk to Boston (Boston: Clarke, 1899).
The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912).
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914).

Edition

The Promised Land, foreword by Oscar Handlin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS-- UNCOLLECTED: FICTION

"Malinke's Atonement," Atlantic Monthly, 108 (September 1911): 300-319.
"The Amulet," Atlantic Monthly, 111 (January 1913): 31-41.
"The Lie," Atlantic Monthly, 112 (August 1913): 177-190.

NONFICTION

"First Aid to the Alien," Outlook, 101 (29 June 1912): 481-485.
"How I Wrote The Promised Land," New York Times Book Review, 30 June 1912, p. 392.
"A Woman to Her Fellow Citizens," Outlook, 102 (2 November 1912): 482-486.
"A Confession of Faith," Boston Jewish Advocate (15 February 1917): 5.
"His Soul Goes Marching On," Berkshire Courier, 91 (14 May 1925): 1.
"The Soundless Trumpet," Atlantic Monthly, 159 (April 1937): 560-569.
"House of the One Father," Common Ground, 1 (Spring 1941): 36-42.

LETTERS

Evelyn Salz, "The Letters of Mary Antin: A Life Divided," American Jewish History, 84, no. 2 (1994): 71-80.
Salz, ed., Selected Letters of Mary Antin (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Mary Antin occupies a central place in American prose writings on immigration and is most identified with her 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land. Written and published in the pre-World War I period of mass immigration and Americanization, the work came to represent for much of the twentieth century not just the story of a Russian Jewish immigrant girl but the experience of Americanization itself. In the wake of an ethnic revival, Houghton Mifflin republished the work in 1969 with an introduction by Oscar Handlin, and by 1985, when the Princeton University Press reprinted the volume, the original 1912 publication had gone through thirty-four printings and sold eighty-five thousand copies. In 1997 Penguin released an edition that reproduced for the first time since 1912 the eighteen black-and-white photographs from the original. In addition, excerpts from Antin's autobiography can be found in both primary- and secondary-school textbooks throughout the century. Scholars have described Antin's narrative in broad terms. Albert E. Stone writes that "The Promised Land dramatizes the historical experience of Americanization in frankly mythic terms," arguing that Antin "represents herself as the prototypical immigrant transformed into a new self." James Craig Holte concludes that "Mary Antin provides an example of Americanization at its best," and because the work has been so widely read and received, Mary V. Dearborn writes that it has become "an immigrant classic." While The Promised Land is often equated with Antin's life, it excludes most of her mature life with its greater complexities. In the late twentieth century, interdisciplinary scholarship focused on issues of gender, and ethnicity has led to a renewed interest in Antin and a reassessment of her life and work.

Born 13 June 1881 in Polotzk, Russia, to Esther Weltman and Israel Antin, Mary was named Maryashe and nicknamed Mashinke or Mashke. Her mother was the only child of an unusually prosperous businessman. As a young girl Esther assisted her father in his business, managing the accounting as well as Russian and Polish customers, but at age sixteen a marriage was arranged for her with Israel Antin. Though from a less prosperous family, Antin had distinguished himself in scholarship and study for the rabbinate. When Esther's father died in 1885, she inherited the family business. Antin, who had left his studies, joined his wife in the enterprise, and for some years the family thrived in Polotzk.

Mary Antin writes in her autobiography that they lived well in the early years of her life: her parents worked in the store and employed servants for the domestic chores, and tutors were hired for the oldest children, Frieda and Mary, who studied Hebrew, Russian, German, and arithmetic. During this period two more children, Joseph and Deborah, were born. However, illness struck the family: first Israel, then the children, and finally Esther, who was bedridden for two years. Rising medical bills eventually led to financial ruin. Their financial struggles, in combination with anti-Semitic policies and pogroms that prevailed in Russia at the time, ultimately compelled the Antins to emigrate, along with a mass migration of Eastern European Jews at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Polotzk, located on the Dvina River, which flows into the Baltic Sea in the province of Vitebesk, existed within the Pale of Settlement, an area of land where Jews were permitted to reside. Located between the Baltic and Black Seas, the Pale was created by the Imperial Russian government after the third partition of Poland in 1795. Historically, the city of Polotzk existed under various rules (Kievan Russian, Mongolian, Lithuanian, and Polish), but it was annexed by Russia in 1772. A center of Hasidic Judaism, Polotzk had a population of more than twenty thousand in the 1897 census, of which 61 percent was Jewish. In the year Antin was born, Czar Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg and was succeeded by Alexander III, whose more repressive anti-Jewish policies led to the first major wave of Jewish emigration. In 1891 Israel Antin emigrated to the United States during the second wave. For three years he labored in the United States while his family remained in Polotzk; during that time Frieda and Mary ended their studies and became apprentices in a milliner's shop. In 1894 Antin sent for his four children and their mother.

In Boston, Israel Antin enrolled three of his children (Mary, Deborah, and Joseph) in the Chelsea Public School, while Frieda went to work in a garment factory. For him, like many immigrants, education meant hope for the next generation. Thus, to extend Mary 's formal education in America, Antin told school officials his daughter was eleven, not thirteen, and since Mary was small of stature, the claim was credible. Later, Antin fictionalized this event in her story "The Lie" ( Atlantic Monthly , August 1913). The importance of school for the Antin family is conveyed throughout her writings, but especially in her description of the first day in school. In The Promised Land Antin writes: "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." Denied formal education in Russia as a Jew and as a girl, Antin thrived and excelled in school. She completed first through fourth grades in half a year. In fifth grade she found a mentor and friend in her teacher, Miss Dillingham, who submitted Antin's poem "Snow" to the journal Primary Education. Upon seeing her name in print, Antin was determined to become a writer. Her poetry appeared in newspapers such as the Boston Herald and the Transcript . At her grammar-school graduation ceremony in 1897 she was presented as a model of what the American system of free education could do for an immigrant.

Antin caught the attention of Jewish leaders in Boston, including Hattie L. Hecht. Hecht introduced her to Philip Cowen, editor of the weekly American Hebrew, through whom Antin met Josephine Lazarus, sister of the American poet and activist Emma Lazarus. Hecht persuaded Cowen to arrange for the publication of a letter Antin wrote in the summer of 1894 to her maternal uncle Moshe Hayyim Weltman in Polotzk about the six-week journey to Boston. It was translated from Yiddish into English with the help of Rabbi Solomon Schindler and published in 1899 as From Plotzk to Boston. The British writer Israel Zangwill , who later examined the immigrant experience in his drama The Melting Pot (1909), wrote the introduction for the book.

Zangwill refers to Antin as the "infant phenomenon" in his introduction, stating that she was eleven when she wrote the letters. Actually thirteen in 1894, Antin nevertheless evokes the enthusiasm of a young girl and the immediacy of a recent journey. Zangwill describes Antin's writing as the "raw stuff of art" and alludes to her "quick senses" and "keen powers of observation." The original Yiddish letter, bound and located in the Boston Public Library, includes a brief "History of This Manuscript," written by Antin in 1914 for the twentieth anniversary of the family's landing in Boston. She explains that she found the original Yiddish letter "in the possession of my uncle, Berl Weltman, in Vilna" on her way to revisit Polotzk in 1910. She learned that the letter had "circulated widely in Polotzk, had been sent around to various branches of the family in different parts of Russia, finally winding up in Vilna." She notes that it miraculously survived the revolution of 1905, "when everybody made it a point to destroy useless papers of every description, so as to have the fewer questions to answer when the police came to make domicilary searches." She also explains the error in the title: "The name of my native town appeared in this erroneous form because the gentleman who edited my manuscript had never heard of Polotzk, but was familiar with the name Plotzk, and my corrections on the proofs were ignored."

The sixty-three-page volume traces the journey from Polotzk to Vilna and concludes with the reunion of the Antins in Boston. Zangwill argues that Antin's narrative is a "human document of considerable value" for it gives a vision of the "inner feelings of the people themselves" and the "magic vision of free America" that lures immigrants. Further, it "enables us to see almost with our own eyes how the invasion of America appears to the impecunious invader." Prophetically, Zangwill predicts spiritual suffering for this gifted Russian girl, which he associates with the "curse of reflectiveness." Antin's first book was reviewed in the New York Times Saturday Review (27 May 1899) and Josephine Lazarus reviewed it for the Critic (April 1899). Patterns emerge in this first book that are evident in later writings: like later works, From Plotzk to Boston was commissioned (a request from her uncle and Antin's teachers, mentors, and benefactors); like her fiction and nonfiction, it serves educational ends; and, like most of her writing, it is autobiographical. At the peak of her writing career, Antin wrote to Randolph Bourne on 11 August 1913, stating "Everything I write is autobiography."

The publication of Antin's first book contributed to her celebrity status, ongoing correspondence with her mentors, and friendship with Lazarus. She also entered Boston Latin Grammar School for Girls (class of 1901) with hopes of attending college at Radcliffe. Antin's high-school education in the Boston Latin Grammar School was exceptional, considering the limited possibilities of public education for all Americans at the turn of the century. Before 1898 there were no public high schools in New York City, and for most students in the Progressive Era, school ended with the sixth or eighth grade. The Antins were determined to provide their promising daughter with an education, even if the family fared less well as a result. During Mary 's school years, Israel Antin operated a variety of grocery stores in the Boston area--first a refreshment stand on Revere Beach and later grocery stores in Chelsea and South Boston. Serving Boston's poor in tenement districts made it difficult to collect payment, and the combined family earnings (including Frieda's work in the garment factory and Joseph's newspaper sales) were all necessary for their survival. Two more Antin children were born in Boston--May and Celia--to compound the financial difficulties. When the business on Arlington Street failed, Israel sought a loan from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to establish another business, and the family moved to a poorer district in Boston's South End--first to 11 Wheeler Street and later Dover Street. Thus, as Antin continued her studies she lived between two social classes, represented by the Boston Latin Grammar School and the tenement districts. As Sam Bass Warner writes in Province of Reason (1984), "the tensions of family, school and street pulled relentlessly at Mary."

During this time Antin joined the Natural History Club at Hale House, and on one of their outings met Amadeus William Grabau. Grabau came to Boston from Albany, New York, to pursue his geological studies, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Harvard University. Subsequently, Grabau taught geology at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute and at Tufts College; he also served as a guide and lecturer for the Museum of the Boston Society of Natural History. The son of a German Lutheran minister, Grabau was born in 1870 in Cedarburgh, Wisconsin, but he completed his secondary schooling in Buffalo, New York. Though they were from different cultures, Antin and Grabau, eleven years her senior, both came from immigrant families committed to religion and education. Additionally, both were intellectually gifted, sharing a faith in reason and a love of learning. On 5 October 1901 Antin and Grabau were married. That fall Grabau took a position as lecturer in paleontology at Columbia University, and the couple moved to New York City.

For Antin, the period from 1901 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 represented change and literary productivity: Antin moved from her own family and mentors in Boston and adjusted to her role as a faculty wife and mother in New York. She became a celebrity because of her writings and joined the national lecture circuit. She attended the Teacher's College at Columbia University in 1901-1902 and Barnard College from 1902 to 1904, although she never enrolled in a degree program or completed a degree. In New York City Antin's friendship with Lazarus deepened. Though they were of different ages and backgrounds, both struggled, according to Warner, with "how to orient themselves in an environment that included modern secular Judaism, anti-Semitism, and uprooted Eastern European orthodox Jewish settlements." Grabau became a professor at Columbia in 1905, and about this time the Grabaus moved to Scarsdale. Their only child, Josephine Esther, was born on 21 November 1907 in New York City and named after Lazarus as well as Antin's mother, Esther Weltman. In 1910 Antin returned to Polotzk for a visit, though little is known about this trip. She completed her autobiography, which Lazarus had encouraged her to write, on 10 April 1910.

The Promised Land is Antin's best known and most enduring work. Serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1911-1912 and published in book form in 1912, it was dedicated to Lazarus. At about the same time she published a short essay, "How I Wrote The Promised Land ," in the New York Times Book Review (30 June 1912). The autobiography was an immediate best-seller. For many readers it represented a paradigmatic immigrant memoir. For others, such as critic Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The Promised Land helped establish the pattern for modern Jewish autobiography. Antin's own assessment in her introduction explains its broad appeal: "I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives." The narrative is about transformation, as the opening lines convey: "I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over."

The Promised Land consists of twenty chapters, divided roughly equally between the Antins' life in Russia and the United States. In the first half of the autobiography, she focuses on the collective experience of Jews in the Pale, imagining a non-Jewish, Anglo-American audience for whom Judaic religious observances and beliefs may be unfamiliar and historical circumstances of czarist policies abstract or remote. Thus, she includes a glossary of more than six pages of Yiddish and Hebrew terms at the back of the autobiography. Antin documents economic hardship, religious persecution, and the daily life of a community in the Pale--her family serves as a microcosm for that communal story. In the latter chapters, Antin foregrounds her life as a child and adolescent, emphasizing her transformation to American citizen and her discovery of natural history and focusing on school experiences.

The book has generally been seen in the context of Americanization, both as a specific movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century and as a general process. The historical movement of Americanization is characterized by two poles: one at which it was identified with Anglo-Saxon culture, and the other, with multiple ethnic identities linked to a national culture, described by Philip Gleason in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) as "cosmopolitan nationalism." During the period from 1900 to 1920, notes Gleason, "the former emphasis became more dominant, eventually giving the whole movement a repressive and nativistic tone." Given the task of educating immigrant children, schools have been central to this process of Americanization. Antin illustrates this process throughout her autobiography as she identifies with teachers and the school system--which represses, but does not erase, Jewish knowledge and practices. Antin explains her school success: "I was Jew enough to have an aptitude for language; I was Antin enough to read each lesson with my heart." Identification with the school, a process her father supported, meant the immigrant exchanged one history for another. Antin writes, "the story of the exodus was not history to me in the sense that the story of the American revolution was." Association with George Washington offered an historical narrative and an alternative sense of peoplehood: by exchanging the Hebrew prophets for Washington, Antin imagined a parallel story for the "luckless sons of Abraham." Prior national discourses for Antin signified tyranny, exclusion, and oppression: Polotzk was "not my country. It was Goluth--exile." By contrast, the discourse of Americanization promised peoplehood by inclusion.

Thus, for Antin, the new national discourse signaled emancipatory promise and democracy: "Over and over and over again I discover that I am a wonderful thing, being human; that I am the image of the universe, being myself; that I am the repository of all the wisdom in the world, being alive and sane at the beginning of this twentieth century. The heir of the ages am I, and all that has been is in me, and shall continue to be in my immortal self." Because of the identification with narratives of nationhood, the autobiography is often interpreted as nationalistic and patriotic. Antin's attachment to America can be understood in part because of her being denied an education in Polotzk. Warner writes, "In Russia Mary Antin had been excluded from public education because she was Jewish, and she had been forbidden Jewish education because she was a girl." Though she grew up hearing the names of "Rebeccah, Rachel and Leah," she also learned that "woman's only work was motherhood," that "a girl was born for no other purpose," and the kitchen was "a girl's real schoolroom." Consequently, New World educational opportunities in public schools and libraries gave Antin cause to celebrate. In the chapter "The Kingdom of the Slums," Antin recalls living on Dover Street, a poor immigrant neighborhood of tenements, but she called the Boston Public Library "home." The library, she writes, remained "mine because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine, though I lived on Dover Street. My palace--mine!" Later, she adds, "I was at home here."

Generally, reviews of The Promised Land were favorable; Grabau collected more than two hundred of them in a scrapbook. The attention stimulated her literary career, making the years from 1911 to 1914 her most prolific ones. Living and writing during the peak period of emigration from Europe and during the Progressive Era, Antin focuses primarily on the meaning of immigration--both for the immigrant and for American society--in the period before World War I. Her works are set in both the Old World and the New.

In the same year that her autobiography began its serialization in the Atlantic Monthly, where all her fiction appeared, she published her first story, "Malinke's Atonement." Set in Polotzk and focusing on a poor and struggling widow, Breine Henne, and her two children, Yosele and Malinke, the story demonstrates Antin's ability to portray sympathetically and powerfully her Russian Jewish past. The story addresses poverty but eschews blame, beginning: "It was not the fault of Breine Henne, the egg-woman, if her only daughter, Malinke, had to assume the burdens of housekeeping before she cast her milk teeth." Establishing the resourcefulness of the two female characters, Antin situates the family in the larger historical and political context: "The law of circumstance was potent in Polotzk, next to the law of the Czar." Gender distinctions figure prominently in the story, as Malinke is told by the Rebbe: "You are only a girl. . . . Girls don't need to know things out of books." On one level, the story revolves around a Sabbath meal; Malinke's mother sends her to the rabbi to ask if a chicken with "a bit of crooked wire in the intestine" is kosher and can be eaten. On another level it is about Jewish religious practices and divine justice--whether a just God would condemn a poor and hungry family to discard food. Believing in divine justice, defying a rav, and feeling the wrath and forgiveness of God, Malinke is eventually rewarded when the rav offers her an education, adding, "I pray that I have the wisdom to teach you." The story demonstrates Malinke's faith in a just divinity and a rational universe, both of which are recurring themes in Antin's writing.

Her two other fictional stories, both published in 1913, address immigration and demonstrate the growth of the writer's talent and imagination. "The Amulet," set in Polotzk, is rich in dialogue and description and reminiscent of the folktales of Eastern European Jewish tradition so powerfully captured by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In this story, Yankel and his wife, Sorele, long for a child. The narrator describes the lonely Sorele in her home with little to occupy her hands and mind. Yankel, whose first wife died barren, seeks comfort, buying an amulet for ten rubles on his business travels. His wife becomes pregnant, but he later learns that if the child is a girl, the wife will die. Distraught that he may lose even his wife, Yankel seeks refuge in the synagogue until he learns his wife bore a son and both are fine. Again, the story is about religious faith and divine justice, though the tale is embedded with misogyny.

"The Lie," Antin's last published work of fiction, evokes the lie her father told to obtain educational opportunities for her. The story is much more, however: it teaches American readers about Jewish immigrants through David Rudinsky and his parents, portraying their lives through the perspective of a sympathetic teacher, Miss Ralston. Bright and curious, David is also innocent and sensitive. When he misses school because of illness, Miss Ralston visits David at home, above the first-floor candy shop that his parents operate. There she learns the cause of his illness: David's father lied about his age to secure his place in school; when David discovered the lie, he became sick. Antin's narrator writes of the teacher: "She recognized in his story one of those ethical paradoxes which the helpless Jews of the Pale, in their search for a weapon that their oppressors could not confiscate, have evolved for their self-defense. She knew that to many honest Jewish minds a lie was not a lie when told to an official." Miss Ralston, representing American authority, sees the nobility of the immigrant in his desire to learn. In this capacity, Ralston says to David: "Talking with your parents downstairs I saw why it was that the Russian Jews are so soon at home here in our dear country. In the hearts of men like your father, dear, is the true America." Here, as in most of her writing, Antin portrays the immigrant as noble.

Her short nonfiction prose varies in content. Three essays were published in 1912, one on her autobiography and two on political issues of the historical moment. The brief essay, "First Aid to the Alien," is an ironic treatment of Americanization, revealing Antin's sense of humor. Set on a train in America, the essay focuses on a young botanist's irritation with Italian immigrant children who have tossed paper and peelings on the floor of the train. He teaches the boys to pick up the trash and in the process schools them about citizenship in America. Later, the botanist receives a letter from a friend, a teacher who rails against his foolishness in teaching his young pupil to equate the American flag and patriotism with picking up trash: the message of the botanist's lesson reduced America to mean, "No rubbish on the floor." The essay satirizes reformers who preach only law and order.

A more gripping essay, published the same year, is "A Woman to Her Fellow Citizens," an argument for the Progressive Party and an endorsement of its 1912 presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt . It reveals Antin's command of the language and her striking use of reason in the charged political climate. Generally, it also represents an argument for progressive reforms that Antin identifies with a "fight for righteousness." She takes on the label "radical"--defining it as "one who goes to the root of every question to be solved!"--yet she affirms a range of reformist progressive programs: "clean government . . . slums torn down . . . healthy mothers in place of milk stations . . . widening city streets and planting trees and insisting on air spaces." Progressivism, resting on the faith that rational knowledge could transform social ills, receives a clear formulation by Antin: "If scientists find that heredity and environment are equal factors in shaping a man, then the legislatures shall pass such laws as will insure to every future American the best possible birth and the finest possible nurture." In many ways this essay brings together all of Antin's concerns--her faith in the American system to serve its people and her ability to use reason and effective language in the service of causes about which she felt passionately, especially immigration. Although the suffrage movement was gaining momentum by 1912, Antin states in this essay, "I am not a suffragist." Nowhere in her writing, however, does Antin discuss her resistance to suffrage.

Antin's third book, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration , was published in 1914. The work might best be seen in context of the Dillingham Commission, established by Congress in 1907 to investigate the so-called new emigrants from eastern and southern Europe. In a report released in 1911 the commission concluded that the "new" immigrants differed from the "old" and called for emigration restriction. In opposition, They Who Knock at Our Gates develops the argument that immigrants provide the foundation of the nation and therefore, the immigration gates should be kept open. Organizing the book into three parts, Antin calls the Declaration of Independence the basic American law--comparable to the Law of Moses for the Israelites--and asserts that it is violated by the exclusion of immigrants. In the second section Antin insists that Americans depend on immigrants, while the "real exploiters of our country 's wealth are not the foreign laborers but the capitalists who pay their wages." It is not the immigrants who ruin the country, she argues; rather, politicians make immigrants into scapegoats "for all the sins of untrammeled capitalism." In the last section, "The Fiery Furnace," she alludes to the biblical book of Daniel, comparing the faith of the Israelites in their God to deliver them "from the fiery furnace" with the faith of the immigrants: both looked to the promised land. She cites Grace Abbott, the progressive reformer, who said of the new immigrants: "It was their faith in America . . . that touched me the most." They Who Knock at Our Gates appears abstract and formal, yet its logic--reflecting progressive faith in reason to guide civilization--remains a striking feature of the book. Unlike Antin's other publications, this work has not been reissued and is generally ignored in discussions of her writings.

The outbreak of war in Europe had cataclysmic effects on Antin, both in her personal and creative life, from which she never fully recovered. From 1913 to 1918 she traveled throughout the United States giving lectures on such topics as "The Responsibility of American Citizenship," "The Civic Education of the Immigrant," "Jewish Life in the Pale: A Lesson for Americans," and "The Zionist Movement." Her lecture tours were sponsored first by the Progressive Party and later by the National Americanization Committee, the National Security League, and the Committee on Public Information. Antin's only publication during this time was "A Confession of Faith," a short essay for the Boston Jewish Advocate (15 February 1917), in which she argues for a Jewish homeland to safeguard Jewish culture, "some place set apart where they may live their group life unmolested."

Although she is often described as promoting patriotism, her letters to her husband's friend Thomas Watson suggest other possible explanations for her decision to embark on a lecture tour. In the fall of 1915 Antin wrote Watson and arranged to repay a 1906 loan of $100 that Grabau received from Watson, with interest, planning to surprise Grabau with the receipt. She alludes to the "bothersome debt," Grabau's "meager income" of $2,500, "petty worries about household bills," and the "good fortune" that through her writing she can relieve him of some of these "harrowing things." A lecture tour earned between $6,000 and $10,000 a season, and she went "only where I was called." Later, commenting on the lecture tour to writer Mary Austin, Antin claims that the lectures began because of a "series of curious accidents," and "driven by a sense of civic duty, I kept on, although I hated the life and discounted the value of my efforts." She also added that her husband followed her public career with the "same affectionate pride . . . just as he had watched my literary beginnings."

While Antin lectured for the Allied cause, her husband supported Germany. According to Grabau's student, Hervey Shimer, the professor admired German science and could see little wrong with his ancestral homeland. In an 11 March 1925 letter to Austin, Antin remarked how her husband changed in 1914 and described its effect: "my lover-husband turned into a dreadful hostile stranger who terrorized the household and scandalized the community (no, I am not exaggerating; these are matters of history). I suffered, through my failure to adjust myself, a nervous break-down." Tensions in the Grabau household inevitably mounted and were felt by their daughter, who later claimed, "They saw what they were doing to me and finally agreed to separate for my sake." On 12 July 1917 Antin wrote from Hartsdale, New York, to Watson, accepting the offer of a serial loan of a hundred dollars a month "until my affairs in Scarsdale are settled," implying the separation had occurred. In the following month she wrote to Watson that her father had died and she would be with her mother and sisters, adding, "I am tired, but not tired enough to fail them." The Grabaus' marriage had become a casualty of the war.

Reflecting on this period in a letter to Rabbi Abraham Cronbach in 1937, Antin assesses that toll: "The war was hard on me, too. . . . The war swept away the home in Scarsdale." The war also "swept away" her marriage and Grabau's teaching post. Grabau "expressed his German sympathies rather forcibly," according to Shimer, leading to his dismissal from Columbia University in 1919. Before Grabau's departure for China in 1920, Antin wrote to Watson on 11 September 1920, indicating she had seen Grabau in June and was shocked by his "painfully diseased appearance." Of her husband, Antin writes that he was "the man for whom I laid out clean linens as he needed it for fifteen years . . . a woman fetters herself with a sense of responsibility. . . . I do not know what I am to Amadeus at this moment. He to me is the man who brought glory into my life, and chaos. He is the one who cherished me like father and mother and lover and dearest friend in one; he is the one who wounded me and trampled on me and made sport of the sufferings he inflicted." Grabau left for China in 1920 as China Foundation Research Professor at the National University at Peking and chief paleontologist of the Chinese Geological Survey, where he had a distinguished career. According to Shimer, the estranged couple did correspond, and Grabau dedicated what he considered his most important book, The Rhythm of the Ages (1940), "To my wife Mary Antin, my daughter Josephine, and my granddaughters Margaret and Elizabeth Ross." He visited the United States only once at the special invitation of the Geological Society of America to attend an International Geological Congress at Washington in 1933. Antin and Grabau reputedly met during that visit. Recent research, however, suggests that Grabau sought a divorce and remarried by 1942.

After the collapse of her marriage and household, Antin suffered a nervous breakdown, a point in her life that, as, she later wrote to Mary Austin , "commenced my real education." Though she continued on the lecture circuit sporadically after 1916, she writes, "When I wasn't lecturing I was under treatment by an assortment of neurologists." She refers to her "psychoneurosis" and continuing education in the "hells of sanitariums, at the hands of doctors of various schools of psychotherapy." Evelyn Salz reasons that Antin suffered from a bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder, and for a time in the early 1920s she was a patient at the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1923 she "abandoned the doctors" and moved to Gould Farm, a "service community, specializing in mental and physical rehabilitation," founded in 1913 by William Gould and set on 550 acres in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. When Gould died on 8 May 1925, Antin submitted an article to the Berkshire Courier celebrating his life and work. At the end of the article the editors identified Antin as a resident of Gould Farm, who after her "extraordinary recovery" decided to make Gould Farm her home and the study of the Gould methods her next work.

Efforts to regain her literary career are found throughout her correspondence in the mid 1920s. This desire is especially evident in her appeal to the nature writer and novelist Austin, whom Antin knew only through her writings. On 11 March 1925, referring to Austin as a "sister spirit," Antin wrote, "What is the matter with me? and how to remedy what's wrong?" Questioning her inability to write, she sought to understand that loss. In that process she reevaluated her earlier publications. In 1926 she contacted Houghton Mifflin about her last book, asking them to stop releasing it: "Why do you still circulate that . . . piece of rhetoric, They Who Knock? Who buys it? It is out of date!" She asked, "Will my kind publishers give the matter another think?" Houghton Mifflin cited the "inspirational quality of the book" and argued that it was selling about two hundred copies a year, too many to "choke it." Antin finally agreed to "not interfere any further in the matter." At the end of 1926 she appealed to Houghton Mifflin to intervene with the Boston Herald and its treatment of her life and autobiography. The newspaper annually used the occasion of Washington's birthday to produce what she called "patriotic hash." In a satiric self-portrait she mocked the paper's reading of The Promised Land, and she offered a parody of the patriotic essays on her life. The parody acknowledges her nervous breakdown, yet it states she emerged in a healthier state than before. The parody also affirms that "no one can be found sufficiently informed, or sufficiently prophetic, to read us the riddle of M---A---'s ten year silence." In 1927 Antin wrote to the Boston Public Library about donating the manuscript of The Promised Land. In the exchange of letters that followed she refers to the altered conditions of her life: "I have grown steadily poorer . . . and richer in personal freedom." She adds that she might prefer to be "stripped to one suit of clothes and my typewriter."

Her extensive correspondence with friends, editors, rabbis, intellectuals, and writers continued in the 1930s. What is most evident during these years is a spiritual searching. In 1931 she and Josephine Grabau met the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba when Thomas Watson invited Baba to the United States for the first time. While Josephine remained a follower of Baba throughout her life and met her husband through him, Antin moved away from the group. In the late 1930s she became interested in mysticism. In 1936 Antin returned to Gould Farm, and in the following year she published her first article in twenty years, "The Soundless Trumpet" (Atlantic Monthly, April 1937). The essay reflects on mysticism and the nature of scientific knowledge; Antin insists on the existence of both. The essay also reveals that Antin, isolated from her family, husband, and past, longed for connection with the world. She concludes: "My fleeting glimpses into the heart of things, the nostalgic sweetness of my moments of absorption into the world about me, the thrill of the soundless trumpet summoning me to cross the barrier of sense--all these are only the faintest tremblings of the Veil in the inconstant breath of my too feeble aspiration. I know what to look for, but I have not seen it."

Antin's spiritual and philosophical quest is also evident in her last essay, "House of the One Father" ( Common Ground, Spring 1941). In both these final essays Antin seeks explanatory frameworks for reconciling opposing cultures and epistemologies. In "House of the One Father" she addresses more specifically the complexity of her own identity as a Jew and as an American. She reconciles any tensions she may have felt by linking Judaism and democracy: "'What is democracy,' I declaimed, 'except the ancient Hebrew idea of the Fatherhood of God, from which follows the Brotherhood of Man.'" She insists on the "Hebrew-Christian basis of American democracy," arguing that the "two philosophical systems, the Hebrew and the American, were essentially one." Once again she affirms America, where differences shrink, where doors of opportunity and inclusion open, and where "each was a door to the House of the One Father." Aware of growing fascism in Europe and the plight of European Jews, Antin asserts her Jewish identity: "I shall claim the Jewish badge; but in my Father's house of many mansions I shall continue a free spirit." Yearning for a world without labels, Antin writes, "Let me pass in the world under any label the social vision of the time may apply." Antin affirms a bond to any persecuted group and commits to "do my part" where America or individual liberty is threatened.

During the last years of her life Antin changed residence from Winchester, Massachusetts, near her family, to Gould Farm, then to Scarsdale, Albany, and New York City. Occasionally, she requested advances on her royalties, and in 1940 she sought a bank loan against the royalties on her published works. Having battled cancer, Antin died at Pinehurst Nursing Home in Suffern, New York, on 15 May 1949. Her obituary appeared in The New York Times on 18 May.

Mary Antin is probably most remembered for her autobiography of immigration that captured much of the mythologized Americanization experience in her narrative of transformation. Yet, much of her life remains absent in that story. Thus, the celebrated narrative also exposes the contradictions of the mythic national discourse, not only for one Russian Jewish immigrant woman but for the many others for whom the promised land did not fully realize its promises.

Papers: See also the Antin entry in Yearbook 1984 .Unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials related to Mary Antin can be found in the following collections: the American Jewish Archives (Horace M. Kallen Papers, Abraham Cronbach Correspondence, Max Heller Correspondence); the Boston Public Library; Brown University Library (Maud Howe Elliott Papers); College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Israel Bram Collection); Columbia University (Randolph Bourne Papers); Henry Huntington Library (Mary Austin Papers); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Houghton Mifflin Papers); Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Bernhard G. Richards Correspondence); the Library of Congress; Massachusetts Historical Society (Ellery Sedgwick Papers); Princeton University Libraries (General manuscripts); Syracuse University Library (Anita Weschler Papers); Temple University Library (John M. Stahl Papers); University of Arkansas Libraries (John Gould Fletcher Papers); University of California, Bancroft Library (Simon Lubin Papers); and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries (Van Wyck Brooks Papers).