I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman. Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.)
Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.
Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "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." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."
Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.
Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.
Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery. They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew.
At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.
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