Mary Antin
The early twentieth century in America was shaped in part by the experience of mass immigration, and the writers who emerged from that upheaval brought to English prose a perspective formed by crossing borders that were geographic, cultural, and linguistic. Mary Antin was among those writers — a voice that belonged to more than one world and worked in the language of her adopted country.
Born on June 13, 1881, in Polatsk, Antin became a citizen of the United States and pursued careers as both a writer and an immigration rights activist. She was educated at Barnard College, Teachers College, and Columbia University, and she wrote in English. Her most notable work, The Promised Land, was published in 1912 as an autobiography. Alongside her writing, her activism on behalf of immigration rights placed her literary and public lives in close alignment, both concerned with the circumstances and standing of those who arrived in America from elsewhere.
Antin died on May 15, 1949, in Suffern. The Library of Congress catalogues her under the authorized label "Antin, Mary, 1881–1949," a designation that places her within the bibliographic record of American letters. That span of dates — Polatsk in 1881 to Suffern in 1949 — marks a life conducted across two continents, recorded in English, and anchored in print by the 1912 autobiography that remains her named and documented contribution to American literature.
Quotes by Mary Antin
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.
The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man’s unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers – only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.
A little instruction in the elements of chartography – a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map – would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.
I was at a most impressionable age when I was transplanted to the new soil. I was in that period when even normal children, undisturbed in their customary environment, begin to explore their own hearts, and endeavor to account for themselves and their world.
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.
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.
Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking; and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks.
A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that he is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises.