The Promised Land: The Autobiography of Mary Antin - Softcover

Antin, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1523353899 ISBN 13: 9781523353897

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

The Promised Land

By Mary Antin

Illustrated

The Promised Land is the 1912 autobiography of Mary Antin. It tells the story of her early life in what is now Belarus and her immigration to the United States in 1894. The book focuses on her attempts to assimilate into the culture of the United States. It received very positive reviews and sold more than 85,000 copies in the three decades after its release.  The book's popularity allowed Antin to begin speaking publicly, a platform that she used to promote acceptance of immigration to the United States. It was criticized by anti-immigration activists, who did not see Antin as an American. It was also criticized by some Jews, who felt that she was disrespectful towards her Jewish heritage.

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. Physical continuity with my earlier self is no disadvantage. I could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading. I can analyze my subject, I can reveal everything; for she, and not I, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began.

A generation is sometimes a more satisfactory unit for the study of humanity than a lifetime; and spiritual generations are as easy to demark as physical ones. Now I am the spiritual offspring of the marriage within my conscious experience of the Past and the Present. My second birth was no less a birth because there was no distinct incarnation. Surely it has happened before that one body served more than one spiritual organization. Nor am I disowning my father and mother of the flesh, for they were also partners in the generation of my second self; copartners with my entire line of ancestors. They gave me body, so that I have eyes like my father's and hair like my mother's. The spirit also they gave me, so that I reason like my father and endure like my mother. But did they set me down in a sheltered garden, where the sun should warm me, and no winter should hurt, while they fed me from their hands? No; they early let me run in the fields—perhaps because I would not be held—and eat of the wild fruits and drink of the dew. Did they teach me from books, and tell me what to believe? I soon chose my own books, and built me a world of my own.

In these discriminations I emerged, a new being, something that had not been before. And when I discovered my own friends, and ran home with them to convert my parents to a belief in their excellence, did I not begin to make my father and mother, as truly as they had ever made me? Did I not become the parent and they the children, in those relations of teacher and learner? And so I can say that there has been more than one birth of myself, and I can regard my earlier self as a separate being, and make it a subject of study.

 

About this title

From the Author:

Editor's comments on new edition of Mary Antin
Mary Antin, The Promised Land, first published in 1912 by the prestigious Boston firm Houghton Mifflin Company, after excerpts of it had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, is the most famous American immigrant autobiography. Its author Mary Antin was born on 13 June 1881 in Polotzk, the daughter of Israel and Esther Weltman Antin. Three years after her father emigrated from Russia to the United States, the mother followed with the four children, arriving in Boston on the Polynesia on 8 May 1894. From that time on, Mary Antin1s life was deeply intertwined with Boston. The Jewish-American Antin family lived first on Union Place, then in Revere, and later on Arlington Street in Chelsea where Mary and the younger siblings started to go to Public School, whereas her sister "Fetchke/Frieda" (or Fannie, her later married name was Lasser) who was only a year older than Mary had to work as a seamstress. Mary Antin's teacher Mary S. Dillingham brought about her first publication of the composition "Snow" (the original of which is at the Boston Public Library) in the journal Primary Education. The publication of an Antin poem on George Washington in the Boston Herald followed. It was through writing letters that Antin began her career as a writer of books. Shortly after the transatlantic voyage Mary wrote a long and detailed account for her maternal uncle Mosche Hayyim Weltman. It was Miss Dillingham and her father, who, she writes "between them persuaded" her to translate the Yiddish letter. Later the philanthropist Hattie Hecht connected Antin with Philip Cowen and Israel Zangwill, and the result was an English adaptation of the letter (with the help of Reform Rabbi Solomon Schindler) in the American Hebrew. In 1899, it appeared as a book that misspelled the name of her home town, From Plotzk to Boston, with a glowing introduction by Zangwill, who was to become best known for his popular melodrama The Melting-Pot (1908). The essayist Josephine Lazarus--Emma Lazarus's sister--reviewed the volume for the Critic and became friends with Antin who had also been admitted by the headmaster Mr. Tuttle (called Tetlow in The Promised Land) to the prestigious Boston Latin School for Girls. The family had moved from a gloomy apartment at 11 Wheeler Street (later torn down and replaced by Turnpike Towers) to the slum on Dover Street (now East Berkeley Street), and Mary associated with the South End Settlement House of Edward Everett Hale--famous for such works as "The Man Without a Country" (1863)--sat 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, apparently against Antin1s father1s wishes, in Boston on 5 October 1901, and soon took up residence in New York where Grabau was appointed first as a lecturer and in 1905 as professor at Columbia University. Antin never finished Latin School, and therefore could only take a few college courses as a special student. Their daughter, Antin's only child Josephine Esther Grabau, was born on 21 November 1907. On Antin's 30th birthday, the Grabaus moved to a large house in Scarsdale where several of Antin's relatives, among them her sister Fannie Lasser also lived with them. It was during her Scarsdale years that Antin published short stories, essays, and her books The Promised Land (1912) and They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), with a combined sale of over 100,000. After some successful years as a writer and Progressive lecturer (who was booked by the Boston agency The Players), Antin suffered a nervous breakdown, her marriage broke up, and she lived in poorer circumstances in later years, published little, and died on 15 May 1949. Her husband left Columbia University in 1919 and went to teach in China where he died in 1946.

About the Author:

Mary Antin was born in June of 1881 in Polotzk, White Russia (what is now Belarus). She emigrated from Polotzk to Boston with her family in 1894, when she was thirteen. Her first book, describing her voyage from Russia to the United States, was published in 1899. "The Promised Land" was a bestseller when it was first published in 1912.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1523353899
• ISBN 13: 9781523353897
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208