The Promised Land

I

THE long chapter of troubles which led to my father’s emigration to America began with his own illness. The doctors sent him to Courland to consult expensive specialists, who prescribed tedious courses of treatment. He was far from cured when my mother also fell ill, and my father had to return to Polotzk to look after the business.

My mother kept her bed for nearly two years, suffering and wasting. The business was ruined and the house was stripped to pay the doctors’ and apothecaries’ bills, and my father grew old under his worries. Then everything took a sudden turn. My mother began to improve, and at the same time my father was offered a good position as superintendent of a grist-mill.

As soon as my mother could be moved, he took us all out to the mill, about three versts out of town, on the Polota. We had a pleasant cottage there, with the miller’s red-headed, freckled family for our only neighbors. If our rooms were barer than they used to be, the sun shone in at all the windows; and as the leaves on the trees grew denser and darker, my mother grew stronger on her feet, and laughter returned to our house as the song-bird to the grove.

We children had a very happy summer. We had never lived in the count ry before, and we liked the change. It was endless fun to explore the mill; to squeeze into forbidden places, and be pulled out by the angry miller; to tyrannize over the mill-hands, and be worshiped by them in return; to go boating on the river, and discover unvisited nooks, and search the woods and fields for kitchen herbs, and get lost, and be found, a hundred times a week. And what an adventure it was to walk the three versts into town, leaving a trail of perfume from the wild-flower posies we carried to our city friends!

But these good things did not last. The mill changed hands, and the new owner put a protégé of his own in my father’s place. So, after a short breathing-spell, we were driven back into the swamp of growing poverty and trouble.

The next year or so my father spent in a restless and fruitless search for a permanent position. My mother had another serious illness, and his own health remained precarious. What he earned did not more than half pay the bills in the end, though we were living very humbly now. Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.

Just at this time occurred one of the periodic anti-semitic movements whereby government officials were wont to clear the forbidden cities of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law, they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the Pale, on payment of enormous bribes, and at the cost of nameless risks and indignities.

It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district, at cruelly short notice, was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike next? The Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. And hundreds of the latter, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their tears with the tears that never dried.

The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man’s chance of making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.

Passover was celebrated in tears t hat year. In the story of the Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land.

But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not ‘May we be next year in Jerusalem,’ but ‘Next year — in America! ’ So there was our promised land, and many faces turned toward the West. And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought.

My father was carried away by the westward movement, glad of his own deliverance, but sore at heart for us whom he left behind. It was the last chance for all of us. We were so far reduced in circumstances that he had to travel with borrowed money to a German port, whence he was forwarded to Boston, with a host of others, at the expense of the Baron de Hirsch Emigration Committee.

I was about ten years old when my father emigrated. I was used to his going away from home, and ‘America’ did not mean much more to me than ‘Kherson,’ or ‘Odessa,’ or any other names of distant places. I understood vaguely, from the gravity with which his plans were discussed, and from references to ships, comm it tees, and other unfamiliar things, that this enterprise was different from previous ones; but my excitement and emotion on the morning of my father’s departure were mainly vicarious.

I know the day when ‘ America ’ as a world entirely unlike Polotzk lodged in my brain, to become the centre of all my dreams and speculations. Well I know the day! I was in bed, sharing the measles with some of the other children. Mother brought us a thick letter from father, written just before boarding the ship. The letter was full of excitement. There was something in it besides the description of travel, something besides the pictures of crowds of people, of foreign cities, of a ship ready to put out to sea. My father was traveling at the expense of a charitable organizat ion, without means of his own, wit hout plans, to a strange world where he had no friends; and yet he wrote with the confidence of a wellequipped soldier going into battle. The rhetoric is mine. Father simply wrote that the emigration committee was taking good care of everybody, that the weather was fine, and the ship comfortable. But I heard something, as we read t he let ter together in the darkened room, that was more than the words seemed to say. There was an elation, a hint of t riumph, such as had never been in my father’s letters before. I cannot tell how I knew it. I felt a stirring, a straining in my father’s letter. It was there, even though my mother stumbled over strange words, even though she cried, as women will when somebody is going away. My father was inspired by a vision. He saw something — he promised us something. It was this America. And ‘America’ became my dream.

If it was nothing new for my father to go far from home in search of his fortune, the circumstances in which he left us were unlike anything we had experienced before. We had absolutely no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects. We hardly knew where we belonged in the scheme of our small society. My mother, as a breadwinner, had nothing like her former success. Her health was permanently impaired, her place in the business world had long been filled by others, and there was no capital to start her anew. Her brothers did what they could for her. They were well-todo, but they all had large families, with marriageable daughters and sons to be bought out of military service. The allowance they made her was generous compared to their means, — affection and duty could not do more, — but there were four of us growing children, and my mother was obliged to make every effort within her power to piece out her income.

How quickly we came down from a large establishment, with servants and retainers, and a place among the best in Polotzk, to a single room hired by the week, and the humblest associations, and the averted heads of former friends! But oftenest it was my mother who turned away her head. She took to using the side streets, to avoid the pitiful eyes of the kind and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house, peddling tea or other ware; and both were hard to bear. Many a winter morning she rose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the gripping cold, through the dragging snow, with a pound of tea for a distant customer; and her profit was perhaps twenty kopecks. Many a time she fell on the ice, as she climbed the steep bank on the far side of the Dvina, a heavy basket on each arm. More than once she fainted at the doors of her customers, ashamed to knock as a suppliant where she used to be received as an honored guest. I hope the angels did not have to count the tears that fell on her frostbitten, aching hands as she counted her bitter earnings at night.

And who took care of us children while my mother tramped the streets with her basket? Who but Fetchke? Who but the little housewife of twelve? Sure of our safety was my mother, with Fetchke to watch; sure of our comfort, with Fetchke to cook the soup and divide the scrap of meat and remember the next meal. Joseph was in heder all clay; the baby was a quiet little thing; Mashke was no worse than usual. But still there was plenty to do, with order to keep in a crowded room, and the washing, and the mending. And Fetchke did it all. She went to the river with the women to wash the clothes, and tucked her dress up and stood bare-legged in the water, like the rest of them, and beat and rubbed and rinsed with all her might, till our miserable rags gleamed white again.

And I? I usually had a cold, or a cough, or something to disable me; and I never had any talent for housework. If I swept and sanded the floor, polished the samovar, and ran errands, I was doing much. I minded the baby, who did not need much minding. I was willing enough, I suppose, but t he hard things were done without my help.

My mother sent me sometimes to deliver a package of tea, and I was proud to help in business. One day I went across the Dvina and far up ‘ the other side.’ It was a good-sized expedition for me to make alone, and I was not a little pleased with myself when I delivered my package, safe and intact, into the hands of my customer. But the storekeeper was not pleased at all. She sniffed and sniffed, she pinched the tea, she shook it all out on the counter.

‘Na, take it back,’ she said in disgust; ‘this is not the tea I always buy. It’s a poorer quality.’

I knew the woman was mistaken. I was acquainted with my mother’s several grades of tea. So I spoke up manfully.

‘Oh, no,’ I said; ‘this is the tea my mother always sends you. There is no worse tea.’

Nothing in my life ever hurt me more than that woman’s answer to my argument. She laughed — she simply laughed. But I understood, even before she controlled herself sufficiently to make verbal remarks, that I had spoken like a fool, had lost my mother a customer. I had only spoken the truth, but I had not expressed it diplomatically. That was no way to make business.

I felt very sore to be returning home with the tea still in my hand, but I forgot my trouble in watching a summer storm gather, up the river. The few passengers who took the boat with me looked scared as the sky darkened, and the boatman grasped his oars very soberly. It took my breath away to see the signs, but I liked it, and I was much disappointed to get home dry.

When my mother heard of my misadventure she laughed, too, but that was different, and I was able to laugh myself.

This is the way I helped in the housekeeping and in business. I hope it does not appear as if I did not take our situation to heart, for I did — in my own fashion. It was plain, even to an idle dreamer like me, that we were living on the charity of our friends, and barely living at that. It was plain, from my father’s letters, that he was scarcely able to support himself in America, and that there was no immediate prospect of our joining him. I realized it all, but I considered it all temporary, and I found plenty of comfort in writing long letters to my father, letters which he treasured for years.

As an instance of what I mean by my own fashion of taking trouble to heart, I recall the day when our household effects were attached for a debt. We had plenty of debts, but the stern creditor who set the law on us this time was none of ours. The claim was against a family to whom my mother sublet two of our three rooms, furnished with her own things. The police officers, who swooped down upon us without warning, as was their habit, asked no questions and paid no heed to explanations. They affixed a seal to every lame chair and cracked pitcher in the place; aye, to every faded petticoat found hanging in the wardrobe. These goods, comprising all our possessions and all our tenants’, would presently be removed, to be sold at auction, for the benefit of the creditor.

Lame chairs and faded petticoats, when they are the last one has, have a vital value in the owner’s eyes. My mother moved about, weeping distractedly, all the while the officers were in the house. The frightened children cried. Our neighbors gathered to bemoan our misfortune. And over everything was the peculiar dread which only Jews in Russia feel when agents of the government invade their homes.

The fear of the moment was in my heart, as in every other heart there. It was a horrid, oppressive fear. I retired to a quiet corner to grapple with it. I was not given to weeping, but I must think things out in words. I repeated to myself that the trouble was all about money. Somebody wanted money from our tenant, who had none to give. Our furniture was going to be sold to make this money. It was a mistake, but then the officers would not believe my mother. Still, it was only about money. Nobody was dead, nobody was ill. It was all about money. Why, there was plenty of money in Polotzk. My own uncle had many times as much as the creditor claimed. He could buy all our things back, or somebody else could. What did it matter? It was only money, and money was got by working, and we were all willing to work. There was nothing gone, nothing lost, as when somebody died. This furniture could be moved from place to place, and so could money be moved, and nothing was lost out of the world by the transfer. That was all. If anybody —

Why, what do I see at the window? Breine Malke, our next-door neighbor is — yes, she is smuggling something out of the window! If she is caught! — Oh, I must help! Breine Malke beckons. She wants me to do something. I see — I understand. I must stand in the doorway, to obstruct the view of the officers, who are all engaged in the next room just now. I move readily to my post, but I cannot resist my curiosity. I must look over my shoulder a last time, to see what it is Breine Malke wants to smuggle out.

I can scarcely stifle my laughter. Of all our earthly goods, our neighbor has chosen for salvation a dented bandbox containing a moth-eaten bonnet from my mother’s happier days! And I laugh not only from amusement, but also from lightness of heart. For I have succeeded in reducing our catastrophe to its simplest terms, and I find that it is only a trifle, and no matter of life and death.

I could not help it. That was the way it looked to me.

II

I am sure I made as serious efforts as anybody to prepare myself for life in America, on the lines indicated in my father’s letters. In America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as you, not, familiarly, as thou. The cobbler and the teacher had the same title, Mister. And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, went to school! Education would be ours for the asking, and economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared. So he wanted Fetchke and me to be taught some trade; and my sister was apprenticed to a dressmaker, and I to a milliner.

Fetchke, of course, was successful, and I, of course, was not. Fetchke managed to learn her trade, although most of the time at the dressmaker’s she had to spend in sweeping, running errands, and minding the babies — the usual occupations of the apprentice in any trade.

But I — I had to be taken away from the milliner’s after a couple of months. I did try, honestly. With all my eyes I watched my mistress build up a chimney-pot of straw and things. I ripped up old bonnets with enthusiasm. I picked up everybody’s spools and thimbles, and other far-rolling objects. I did just as I was told, for I was determined to become a famous milliner, since America honored the workman so. But most of the time I was sent away on errands — to the market to buy soup-greens, to the corner store to get change, and all over town with bandboxes half as round again as I. It was winter, and I was not very well dressed. I froze; I coughed; my mistress said I was not of much use to her. So my mother kept me at home, and my career as a milliner was blighted.

This was during our last year in Russia, when I was between twelve and thirteen years of age. I was old enough to be ashamed of my failures, but I did not have much time to brood about them. My Uncle Solomon took me with him to Vitebsk, where I spent several months in comfort and happy activity.

The thing that looms up above all the adventures of this pleasant interval is my introduction, through the books I found in my uncle’s house, to the garden of secular literature. For the first time in my life I read stories that were not in the Bible, and poetry that was not solemn. I ransacked the house for dusty old journals, and sat up nights to read them. Many things fell into my hands that were not intended for a reader of my tender years and slim experience, — wild novels, in Russian, about cruel Cossacks and abducted maidens, — but nothing printed ever harmed me, as if the things that did not belong to my nature failed to take root in my mind.

Vitebsk was a metropolis, compared to which Polotzk was a mere village. Through Uncle Solomon, who traveled much in connection with bis business, I got an idea of a world greater even than Vitebsk, and my imagination reached out beyond my boundaries. My cousin Hirshel also, who was a student in the high school, where he learned many things out of many books, afforded me alluring glimpses of a large world just beyond my reach. I worshiped his retreating footsteps when he set out with his student’s satchel in the morning, and envied him the troubles of which he complained in the evening.

It was during this epochal visit to Vitebsk that I earned money by the work of my hands, for the first and only time in my life. Although I was hopelessly clumsy at knitting and embroidery, the more difficult art of laccraaking aroused my enthusiasm, so that I attained considerable skill with the cushion and bobbins. In V itebsk I turned my one accomplishment to good account, by giving lessons. I enjoyed greatly going about the city in the important character of teacher, and I began to feel superior to circumstances.

I have never seen money that was half so bright to look at, half so pretty to clink, as the money I earned by these lessons. And it was easy to decide what to do with my wealth. I bought presents for everybody I knew. I remember to this day the pattern of the shawl I bought for my mother. When I came home, and unpacked my treasures, I was the proudest girl in Polotzk.

The proudest, but not the happiest. I found my family in such a pitiful state that all my joy was stifled by care, if only for a while.

Unwilling to spoil my holiday, my mother had not written me how things had gone from bad to worse during my absence, and I was not prepared. Fetchke met me at the station, and conducted me to a more wretched hole than I had ever called home before.

I went into the room alone, having been greeted outside by my mother and brother. It was evening, and the shabbiness of the apartment was all the gloomier for the light of a small kerosene lamp standing on the bare deal table. At one end of the table — is this Edle Dvereh? My little sister, dressed in an ugly gray jacket, sat motionless in the lamplight, her fair head drooping, her little hands folded on the edge of the table. At sight of her I grew suddenly old. It was merely that she was a shy little girl, unbecomingly dressed, and perhaps a little pale from underfeeding. But to me, at that moment, she was the personification of dejection, the living symbol of the fallen family state.

Of course my sober mood did not last long. Even ‘fallen family state’ could be interpreted in terms of money, — absent money,—and that, as once established, was a trifling matter. Had n’t I earned money myself? Heaps of it! Only look at this, and this, and this that I brought from Vitebsk, bought with my own money! No, I did not remain old. For many years more I was a very childish child.

Perhaps I had spent my time in Vitebsk to better advantage than at the milliner’s, from any point of view. When I returned to my native town I saw things. I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness, of life in Polotzk. My books, my walks, my visits, as teacher, to many homes, had been so many doors opening on a wider world; so many horizons, one beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had filled my lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond. Child though I was, Poiotzk, when I came back, was too small for me.

And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near. My father’s letters warned us to prepare for the summons, and we lived in a quiver of expectation.

Not that my father had grown suddenly rich. He was so far from rich that he was going to borrow every cent of the money for our third-class passage; but he had a business in view which he could carry on all the better for having the family with him; and, besides, we were borrowing right and left anyway, and all to no definite purpose. With the children, he argued, every year in Russia was a year lost. They should be spending the precious years in school, in learning English, in becoming Americans. United in America, there were ten chances of our getting to our feet again to one chance in our scattered, drifting state.

So at last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out for every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, ‘America! America!’

III

On the day when our steamer-ticket arrived, my mother did not go out with her basket, my brother stayed out of heder, and my sister salted the soup three times. I do not know what I did to celebrate the occasion. Very likely I played tricks on Edle Dvereh, and wrote a long letter to my father.

Before sunset the news was all over Polotzk that Raphael’s Chane Chaye had received a steamer-ticket for America. Then they began to come. Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors, creditors, and mere neighbors — from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere — a steady stream of them poured into our street, both day and night, till the hour of our departure. And my mother gave audience. Her faded kerchief half way off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, she received her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk, and she conducted herself appropriately. She gave her heart’s thanks for the congratulations and blessings that poured in on her; ready tears for condolences; patient answers to monotonous questions; and handshakes and kisses and hugs she gave gratis.

What did they not ask, the eager, foolish, friendly people! They wanted to handle the ticket, and mother must read what was written in it. How much did it cost? Was it all paid for? Were we going to have a foreign passport, or did we intend to steal across the border? Were we not all going to have new dresses to travel in? Was it sure that we could get kosher food on the ship? And with the questions poured in suggestions, and solid chunks of advice were rammed in by nimble prophecies. Mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a ‘Good Jew,’ — say the Rebbe of Libavitz, — to get his blessing on our journey. She must be sure and pack her prayerbooks and Bible, and twenty pounds of zwieback at the least. If they did serve trefah on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried provisions from home. Oh, she must take all the feather-beds! Featherbeds are scarce in America. In America they sleep on hard mattresses, even in winter. Chave Mirel, Yachne the dressmaker’s daughter, who emigrated to New York two years ago, wrote her mother that she got up from childbed with sore sides, because she had no feather-bed. Mother must n’t carry her money in a pocketbook. She must sew it into the lining of her jacket. The policemen in Castle Garden take all their money from the passengers as they land, unless the travelers deny having any.

And so on, and so on, till my poor mother was completely bewildered. And as the day set for our departure approached, the people came oftener and stayed longer, and rehearsed my mother in long messages for their friends in America, praying that she would deliver them promptly on her arrival, and without fail, and might God bless her for her kindness, and she must be sure and write them how she found their friends.

The last night in Polotzk we slept at my uncle’s house, having disposed of all our belongings, to the last threelegged stool, except such as we were taking with us. I could go straight to the room where I slept with my aunt that night, if I were suddenly set down in Polotzk. But I did not really sleep. Excitement kept me awake, and my aunt snored hideously. I was going away from Polotzk, forever and ever, in the morning. I was going on a wonderful journey. I was going to America. How could I sleep?

My uncle gave out a false bulletin, with the last batch that the gossips carried away in the evening. He told them that we were not going to start till the second day. This he did in the hope of smuggling us quietly out, and so saving us the wear and tear of a public farewell. But his ruse failed of success. Half of Polotzk was at my uncle’s gate in the morning, to conduct us to the railway station, and the other half was already there before we arrived.

At the station the procession which accompanied us disbanded and became a mob. My uncle and my tall cousins did their best to protect us, but we wanderers were almost torn to pieces. They did get us into a car at last, and barricaded the door with our numerous bundles, but the riot on the station platform continued unquelled. When the warning bell rang out, it was drowned in a confounding babel of voices — fragments of the oft-repeated messages, admonitions,, lamentations, blessings, farewells. ‘Don’t forget!’

— ‘ Take care of — ’ ‘ Keep your tickets— ’ ‘My Jacob—’ ‘Garlic is best!’

— ‘A happy journey!’ — ‘God help you!’ —‘Good-bye! Good-bye!’ — ‘ Remember — ’

The last I saw of Polotzk was an agitated mass of people, waving colored handkerchiefs and other frantic bits of calico, madly gesticulating, falling on each other’s necks, gone wild together. Then the station became invisible, and the shining tracks spun out from sky to sky. I was in the middle of the great, great world, and the longest road was mine.

IV

Our route lay over the German border, with Hamburg for our port. Leaving the city of Vilna on a gray wet morning in early April, we set out for the frontier. This was the real beginning of our journey, and all my faculties of observation were alert. I took note of everything — the weather, the trains, the bustle of railroad stations, our fellow passengers, and the family mood at every stage of our progress.

The bags and bundles which composed our traveling outfit were much more bulky than valuable. A trifling sum of money, the steamer-ticket, and a foreign passport, were the magic agents by means of which we hoped to span the ten thousand miles of earth and water between us and my father. The passport was supposed to pass us over the frontier without any trouble; but on account of the prevalence of cholera in some parts of the country, the poorer sort of travelers, such as emigrants, were subjected, at this time, to more than ordinary supervision and regulation.

At Verzhbolovo, the last station on the Russian side, we met the first of our troubles. A German physician and several gendarmes boarded the train and put us through a searching examination as to our health, destination, and financial resources. As a result of the inquisition we were informed that we would not be allowed to cross the frontier unless we exchanged our thirdclass steamer-tickets for second-class, which would require two hundred rubles more than we possessed. Our passport was taken from us, and we were to be forced to turn back on our journey.

A long letter which I wrote to my uncle in Polotzk during my first year in America describes the situation: —

‘ We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place. We had hardly money enough to last us through the voyage for which we had hoped and waited for three long years. We had suffered much that the reunion we longed for might come about; we had prepared ourselves to suffer more in order to bring it about, and had parted with those we loved, with places that were dear to us in spite of what we passed through in them, never again to see them, as we were convinced — all for the same dear end. With strong hopes and high spirits that hid the sad parting, we had started on our long journey. And now we were checked so unexpectedly but surely, the blow coming from where we little expected it, being, as we believed, safe in that quarter.

‘ When mother had recovered enough to speak, she began to argue with the gendarme, telling him our story and begging him to be kind. The children were frightened and all but I cried. I was only wondering what would happen.

‘ Moved by our distress, the German officers gave us the best advice they could. We were to get out at the station of Kibart, on the Russian side, and apply to one Herr Schidorsky, who might help us on our way.’

The letter dwells gratefully on the kindness of Herr Schidorsky, who became the agent of our salvation. He procured for my mother a pass to Eidtkuhnen, the German frontier station, where his older brother, as chairman of the Baron de Hirsch Emigration Committee, arranged for our admission into Germany. During the negotiations, which took several days, the good man of Kibart entertained us in his own house, shabby emigrants though we were. The Schidorsky brothers were Jews, but it is not on that account that their name has been lovingly remembered for fifteen years in my family.

On the German side our course joined that of many other emigrant groups, on their way to Hamburg and other ports. We were a clumsy enough crowd, with wide, unsophisticated eyes, with awkward bundles hugged in our arms, and our hearts set on America.

The letter to my uncle faithfully describes every stage of our bustling progress. Here is a sample scene of many that I recorded : —

‘ There was a terrible confusion in the baggage-room where we were directed to go. Boxes, baskets, bags, valises, and great, shapeless things belonging to no particular class, were thrown about by porters and other men, who sorted them and put tickets on all but those containing provisions, while others were opened and examined in haste. At last our turn came, and our things, along with those of all other American-bound travelers, were taken away to be steamed and smoked and other such processes gone through. We were told to wait till notice should be given us of something else to be done.’

The phrase ‘we were told to do this ’ and ‘told to do that’ occurs again and again in my narrative, and the most effective handling of the facts could give no more vivid picture of the proceedings. We emigrants were herded together at the stations, packed in the cars, and driven from place to place like cattle.

’At the expected hour we all tried to find room in a car indicated by the conductor. We tried, but could only find enough space on the floor for our baggage, on which we made believe to be sitting comfortably. For now we were obliged to exchange the comparative comforts of a third-class passenger train for the certain discomforts of a fourth-class one. There were only four narrow benches in the whole car, and about twice as many people were already seated on these as they were probably supposed to accommodate. All other space, to the last inch, was crowded by passengers or their luggage. It was very hot and close and altogether uncomfortable, and still at every new station fresh passengers came crowding in, and actually made room, spare as it was, for themselves. It became so terrible that all glared madly at the conductor as he allowed more people to come into that prison, and trembled at the announcement of every station.’

The plight of the bewildered emigrant on the way to foreign parts is always pitiful enough, but for us who came from plague-ridden Russia the terrors of the way were doubled.

‘ In a great lonely field opposite a solitary house within a large yard, our train pulled up at last, and a conductor commanded the passengers to make haste and get out. He need not have told us to hurry; we were glad enough to be free again after such a long imprisonment in the uncomfortable car. All rushed to the door. We breathed more freely in the open field, but the conductor did not wait for us to enjoy our freedom. He hurried us into the one large room which made up the house, and then into the yard. Here a great many men and women, dressed in white, received us, the women attending to the women and girls of the passengers, and the men to the others.

‘ This was another scene of bewildering confusion, parents losing their children, and little ones crying; baggage being thrown in one corner of the yard, heedless of contents, which suffered in consequence; those white-clad Germans shouting commands always accompanied with “Quick! Quick! the confused passengers obeying all orders like meek children, only questioning now and then what was going to be done with them.

‘And no wonder if in some minds stories arose of people being captured by robbers, murderers, and the like. Here we had been taken to a lonely place where only that house was to be seen; our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see, crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room where a great kettle was boiling on a little stove; our clothes taken off, our bodies rubbed with a slippery substance that might be any bad thing; a shower of warm water let down on us without warning; again driven to another litt le room where we sit, wrapped in woolen blankets, till large, coarse bags are brought in, their contents turned out, and we see only a cloud of steam, and hear the women’s orders to dress ourselves, quick, quick, or else we’ll miss — something we cannot hear. We are forced to pick out our clothes from among all the others, with the steam blinding us; we choke, cough, entreat the women to give us time; they persist: “Quick, quick, or you’ll miss the train!” Oh, so we really won’t be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous sickness. Thank God!’

In Polotzk, if the cholera broke out, as it did once or twice in every generation, we made no such fuss as did these Germans. Those who died of the sickness were buried, and those who lived ran to the synagogues to pray. We travelers felt hurt at the way the Germans treated us. My mother nearly died of cholera once, but she was given a new name, a lucky one, which saved her; and that was when she was a small girl. None of us were sick now, yet hear how we were treated! Those gendarmes and nurses always shouted their commands at us from a distance, as fearful of our touch as if we had been lepers.

We arrived in Hamburg early one morning, after a long night in the crowded cars. Here we were piled up on a high wagon, with our bags and baggage, and driven for hours, not one of us guessing where our destination lay. At length our mysterious ride came to an end, on the outskirts of the city, where we were once more lined up, cross-questioned, disinfected, labeled, and pigeon-holed. This was one of the occasions when we suspected that we were the victims of a conspiracy to extort money from us; for here, as at every repetit ion of the purifying operations we had undergone, a fee was levied on us, —so much per head. My mother, indeed, seeing her tiny hoard melting away, had long since sold some articles from our baggage to a fellow passenger richer than she, but even so she did not have enough money to pay the fee demanded of her in Hamburg. Her statement of that fact was not accepted, and we all suffered the last indignity of having our persons searched. We had nothing left for the policeman in Castle Garden.

This last place of detention turned out to be a prison. ‘Quarantine’ they called it, and there was a great deal of it — two weeks of it. Two weeks within high brick walls, several hundred of us herded in half a dozen compartments, — numbered compartments,— sleeping in rows, like sick people in a hospital; with roll-call morning and night, and short rations three times a day; with never a sign of the free world beyond our barred windows; with anxiety and longing and homesickness in our hearts, and in our ears the unfamiliar voice of the invisible ocean, which drew and repelled us at the same time. The fortnight in quarantine was not an episode; it was an epoch, divisible into eras, periods, events.

The greatest event was the arrival of some ship to take some of the waiting passengers. When the gates were opened and the lucky ones said goodby, those left behind felt hopeless of ever seeing the gates open for them.

Our turn came at last. We were conducted through the gate of departure, and after some hours of bewildering manoeuvres, described in great, detail in the report to my uncle, we found ourselves, we five frightened pilgrims from Polotzk, on the deck of a great big steamship afloat on the strange big waters of the ocean.

For sixteen days the ship was our world. My letter dwells solemnly on the details of the life at sea. It does not shrink from describing the torments of seasickness; it notes every change in the weather. A rough night is described, when the ship pitched and rolled so that people were thrown from their berths; days and nights when we crawled through dense fogs, our foghorn drawing answering warnings from invisible ships.

The perils of the sea were not minimized in the imaginations of us inexperienced voyagers. The captain and his officers ate their dinners, smoked their pipes, and slept soundly in their turns, while we frightened emigrants turned our faces to the wall and awaited our watery graves.

All this while the seasickness lasted. Then came happy hours on deck, with fugitive sunshine, birds atop the crested waves, band-music and dancing and fun. I explored the ship, made friends with officers and crew, or pursued my thoughts in quiet nooks. It was my first experience of the ocean, and I was profoundly moved.

‘ I would imagine myself all alone on the ocean, and Robinson Crusoe was very real to me. I was alone sometimes. I was aware of no human presence; I was conscious only of sea and sky and something I did not understand. And as I listened to its solemn voice, I felt as if I had found a friend, and knew that I loved the ocean. It seemed as if it were within as well as without part of myself; and I wondered how I had lived without it, and if I could ever part, with it.'

And so, suffering, fearing, brooding, rejoicing, we crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised Land, and my father received us in his arms.

During his three years of probation my father had made a great many false starts in business. His history for that period is the history of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in their native land. Dozens of these men pass under your eyes every day, my American friend, too much absorbed in their honest affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the repugnance with which you shrink from their touch. You see them shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons, or bending over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor-shop, or rummaging in your ash-can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at the command of the burly policeman. ‘The Jew peddler!’ you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming that the sordid drama of his days may have a moral that concerns you.

What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom his citizenship papers? What if the cross-legged tailor is supporting a boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitution for you? What if the ragpicker’s daughters are hastening over the ocean to teach your children in the public schools? Think, every time you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was born thousands of years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a common language. Remember that his very physiognomy is a cipher, the key to which it behooves you to search for most diligently.

[In the January issue, Mary Antin will describe the first stages in the making of an American citizen. — THE EDITORS.]