These excerpts are taken from the book The Promised Land written by Mary Antin. Mary was a young, Jewish girl in a village in Russia in the late 1800s. Her family was successful for a time but fell into sickness, bankruptcy and extreme poverty – while subject to extreme religious persecution by “orthodox Christians” in the same village. Her father exulted in magically obtaining a boat ticket to America given by a charitable organization in the United States. He left his family destitute in that Russian village for three years before he could afford to send for them. She arrived in America when she was 12 years old. The one promise her father could keep to his children was that they would receive an education in America:
“Nothing symbolized America more to me than when that little girl across the alley, who didn’t know us and couldn’t understand us, knocked on our tenement door and asked if she could show us the way to school. We only understood two or three words of English between us but we knew the word school.”
“The mean sort of teachers are not teachers at all; they are self-seekers who take up teaching as a business, to support themselves and keep their hands white. As trespassers on a noble profession, they are worth no more than the books and slates and desks over which they preside; so much furniture, to be had by the gross. They do not love their work. They contribute nothing to the higher development of their pupils. They busy themselves, not with research into the science of teaching, but with organizing political demonstrations to advance the cause of selfish candidates for public office, who promise them rewards.
The true teachers are of another strain. Apostles all of an ideal, they go to their work in a spirit of love and inquiry, seeking not comfort, not position, not old-age pensions, but Truth that is the soul of wisdom, the joy of big-eyed children, the food of hungry youth.”
“I had never owned a book before. The sense of possession alone was a source of bliss. Sometimes I carried home half the books in my desk, not because I should need them, but because I loved to hold them; and, also because I loved to be seen carrying books. It was a badge of scholarship.”
“When we began to study the life of Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution and the early days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study had been idle until then. When the teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I sat rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped on the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent sighs of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts between the bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington till I could see them with my eyes shut.”
As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save himself from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant of my sins.”
“The twin of my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had never been ashamed of my family, but this George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were Fellow Citizens. I was a Fellow Citizen and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me; and, at the same time it sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct myself as befitted a Fellow Citizen.”
“What more could America give a child? Ah, much more! As I read how the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons to die in battle, and the heroes led to victory, and the rejoicing people set up a Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by my country. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for them together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each other – all this it was that made my country. It was not a thing that I understood; I could not go home and tell Frieda about it, as I told her other things I learned at school. But I knew one could say “my country” and feel it, as one felt “God” or “myself.” For the country was for all Citizens, and I was a Citizen. When we stood to sing “America,” I shouted the words with all my might.” – Mary Antin: The Promised Land,
