MIRACLES
It was not always in admiration that the finger was pointed at me. One
day I found myself the centre of an excited group in the middle of the
schoolyard, with a dozen girls interrupting each other to express
their disapproval of me. For I had coolly told them, in answer to a
question, that I did not believe in God.
How had I arrived at such a conviction? How had I come, from praying
and fasting and Psalm-singing, to extreme impiety? Alas! my
backsliding had cost me no travail of spirit. Always weak in my faith,
playing at sanctity as I played at soldiers, just as I was in the mood
or not, I had neglected my books of devotion and given myself up to
profane literature at the first opportunity, in Vitebsk; and I never
took up my prayer book again. On my return to Polotzk, America loomed
so near that my imagination was fully occupied, and I did not revive
the secret experiments with which I used to test the nature and
intention of Deity. It was more to me that I was going to America than
that I might not be going to Heaven. And when we joined my father, and
I saw that he did not wear the sacred fringes, and did not put on the
phylacteries and pray, I was neither surprised nor shocked,
remembering the Sabbath night when he had with his own hand turned out
the lamp. When I saw him go out to work on Sabbath exactly as on a
week day, I understood why God had not annihilated me with his
lightnings that time when I purposely carried something in my pocket
on Sabbath: there was no God, and there was no sin. And I ran out to
play, pleased to find that I was free, like other little girls in the
street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and
obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had
not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have
been so ready to put away my religion.
It was Rachel Goldstein who provoked my avowal of atheism. She asked
if I wasn't going to stay out of school during Passover, and I said
no. Wasn't I a Jew? she wanted to know. No, I wasn't; I was a
Freethinker. What was that? I didn't believe in God. Rachel was
horrified. Why, Kitty Maloney believed in God, and Kitty was only a
Catholic! She appealed to Kitty.
"Kitty Maloney! Come over here. Don't you believe in God?--There, now,
Mary Antin!--Mary Antin says she doesn't believe in God!"
Rachel Goldstein's horror is duplicated. Kitty Maloney, who used to
mock Rachel's Jewish accent, instantly becomes her voluble ally, and
proceeds to annihilate me by plying me with crucial questions.
"You don't believe in God? Then who made you, Mary Antin?"
"Nature made me."
"_Nature_ made you! What's that?"
"It's--everything. It's the trees--no, it's what makes the trees grow.
_That's_ what it is."
"But _God_ made the trees, Mary Antin," from Rachel and Kitty in
chorus. "Maggie O'Reilly! Listen to Mary Antin. She says there isn't
any God. She says the trees made her!"
Rachel and Kitty and Maggie, Sadie and Annie and Beckie, made a circle
around me, and pressed me with questions, and mocked me, and
threatened me with hell flames and utter extinction. I held my ground
against them all obstinately enough, though my argument was
exceedingly lame. I glibly repeated phrases I had heard my father use,
but I had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. I had been
surprised into this dispute. I had no spontaneous interest in the
subject; my mind was occupied with other things. But as the number of
my opponents grew, and I saw how unanimously they condemned me, my
indifference turned into a heat of indignation. The actual point at
issue was as little as ever to me, but I perceived that a crowd of
Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have
any kind of God she chose. I knew, from my father's teaching, that
this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United
States, and I held my ground as befitted the defender of a cause.
George Washington would not have treated me as Rachel Goldstein and
Kitty Maloney were doing! "This is a free country," I reminded them in
the middle of the argument.
The excitement in the yard amounted to a toy riot. When the school
bell rang and the children began to file in, I stood out there as long
as any of my enemies remained, although it was my habit to go to my
room very promptly. And as the foes of American Liberty crowded and
pushed in the line, whispering to those who had not heard that a
heretic had been discovered in their midst, the teacher who kept the
line in the corridor was obliged to scold and pull the noisy ones into
order; and Sadie Cohen told her, in tones of awe, what the commotion
was about.
Miss Bland waited till the children had filed in before she asked me,
in a tone encouraging confidence, to give my version of the story.
This I did, huskily but fearlessly; and the teacher, who was a woman
of tact, did not smile or commit herself in any way. She was sorry
that the children had been rude to me, but she thought they would not
trouble me any more if I let the subject drop. She made me understand,
somewhat as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of my whispering
during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious
arguments on school territory. I felt honored by this private
initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State,
and I went to my seat with a good deal of dignity, my alarm about the
safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness.
This is not so strictly the story of the second generation that I may
not properly give a brief account of how it fared with my mother when
my father undertook to purge his house of superstition. The process of
her emancipation, it is true, was not obvious to me at the time, but
what I observed of her outward conduct has been interpreted by my
subsequent experience; so that to-day I understand how it happens that
all the year round my mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile
neighbors; but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement,
calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to
the God of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs
must join in the ancient service. It means, I have come to know, that
she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism; but years
were required for this process of instinctive selection.
My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was rather
headlong and strenuous in his methods. To my mother, on the eve of
departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in
America did not spend their days in praying; and he urged her to leave
her wig in Polotzk, as a first step of progress. My mother, like the
majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on
authority; so she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she
took his hint, and set out upon her journey in her own hair. Not that
it was done without reluctance; the Jewish faith in her was deeply
rooted, as in the best of Jews it always is. The law of the Fathers
was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable
from the spirit. But the breath of revolt against orthodox externals
was at this time beginning to reach us in Polotzk from the greater
world, notably from America. Sons whose parents had impoverished
themselves by paying the fine for non-appearance for military duty, in
order to save their darlings from the inevitable sins of violated
Judaism while in the service, sent home portraits of themselves with
their faces shaved; and the grieved old fathers and mothers, after
offering up special prayers for the renegades, and giving charity in
their name, exhibited the significant portraits on their parlor
tables. My mother's own nephew went no farther than Vilna, ten hours'
journey from Polotzk, to learn to cut his beard; and even within our
town limits young women of education were beginning to reject the wig
after marriage. A notorious example was the beautiful daughter of
Lozhe the Rav, who was not restrained by her father's conspicuous
relation to Judaism from exhibiting her lovely black curls like a
maiden; and it was a further sign of the times that the rav did not
disown his daughter. What wonder, then, that my poor mother, shaken
by these foreshadowings of revolution in our midst, and by the express
authority of her husband, gave up the emblem of matrimonial chastity
with but a passing struggle? Considering how the heavy burdens which
she had borne from childhood had never allowed her time to think for
herself at all, but had obliged her always to tread blindly in the
beaten paths, I think it greatly to her credit that in her puzzling
situation she did not lose her poise entirely. Bred to submission,
submit she must; and when she perceived a conflict of authorities, she
prepared to accept the new order of things under which her children's
future was to be formed; wherein she showed her native adaptability,
the readiness to fall into line, which is one of the most charming
traits of her gentle, self-effacing nature.
My father gave my mother very little time to adjust herself. He was
only three years from the Old World with its settled prejudices.
Considering his education, he had thought out a good deal for himself,
but his line of thinking had not as yet brought him to include woman
in the intellectual emancipation for which he himself had been so
eager even in Russia. This was still in the day when he was astonished
to learn that women had written books--had used their minds, their
imaginations, unaided. He still rated the mental capacity of the
average woman as only a little above that of the cattle she tended. He
held it to be a wife's duty to follow her husband in all things. He
could do all the thinking for the family, he believed; and being
convinced that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to
be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to
order our family life on unorthodox lines. There was no conscious
despotism in this; it was only making manly haste to realize an ideal
the nobility of which there was no one to dispute.
My mother, as we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from
ancient usage that my father had in his habitual scepticism. He had
always been a nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke
of prescribed conduct. Individual freedom, to him, was the only
tolerable condition of life; to her it was confusion. My mother,
therefore, gradually divested herself, at my father's bidding, of the
mantle of orthodox observance; but the process cost her many a pang,
because the fabric of that venerable garment was interwoven with the
fabric of her soul.
My father did not attempt to touch the fundamentals of her faith. He
certainly did not forbid her to honor God by loving her neighbor,
which is perhaps not far from being the whole of Judaism. If his loud
denials of the existence of God influenced her to reconsider her
creed, it was merely an incidental result of the freedom of expression
he was so eager to practise, after his life of enforced hypocrisy. As
the opinions of a mere woman on matters so abstract as religion did
not interest him in the least, he counted it no particular triumph if
he observed that my mother weakened in her faith as the years went by.
He allowed her to keep a Jewish kitchen as long as she pleased, but he
did not want us children to refuse invitations to the table of our
Gentile neighbors. He would have no bar to our social intercourse with
the world around us, for only by freely sharing the life of our
neighbors could we come into our full inheritance of American freedom
and opportunity. On the holy days he bought my mother a ticket for the
synagogue, but the children he sent to school. On Sabbath eve my
mother might light the consecrated candles, but he kept the store open
until Sunday morning. My mother might believe and worship as she
pleased, up to the point where her orthodoxy began to interfere with
the American progress of the family.
The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family
life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the
first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World, while the
second generation leads the life of the New. Nothing more pitiful
could be written in the annals of the Jews; nothing more inevitable;
nothing more hopeful. Hopeful, yes; alike for the Jew and for the
country that has given him shelter. For Israel is not the only party
that has put up a forfeit in this contest. The nations may well sit by
and watch the struggle, for humanity has a stake in it. I say this,
whose life has borne witness, whose heart is heavy with revelations it
has not made. And I speak for thousands; oh, for thousands!
My gray hairs are too few for me to let these pages trespass the limit
I have set myself. That part of my life which contains the climax of
my personal drama I must leave to my grandchildren to record. My
father might speak and tell how, in time, he discovered that in his
first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from
him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he
later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to
value anew; how it fared with his avowed irreligion when put to the
extreme test; to what, in short, his emancipation amounted. And he,
like myself, would speak for thousands. My grandchildren, for all I
know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may
have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in
the direct line has the power to alienate from his successors. Even I,
with my limited perspective, think it doubtful if the conversion of
the Jew to any alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly
accomplished. What positive affirmation of the persistence of Judaism
in the blood my descendants may have to make, I may not be present to
hear.
It would be superfluous to state that none of these hints and
prophecies troubled me at the time when I horrified the schoolyard by
denying the existence of God, on the authority of my father; and
defended my right to my atheism, on the authority of the Constitution.
I considered myself absolutely, eternally, delightfully emancipated
from the yoke of indefensible superstitions. I was wild with
indignation and pity when I remembered how my poor brother had been
cruelly tormented because he did not want to sit in heder and learn
what was after all false or useless. I knew now why poor Reb' Lebe had
been unable to answer my questions; it was because the truth was not
whispered outside America. I was very much in love with my
enlightenment, and eager for opportunities to give proof of it.
It was Miss Dillingham, she who helped me in so many ways, who
unconsciously put me to an early test, the result of which gave me a
shock that I did not get over for many a day. She invited me to tea
one day, and I came in much trepidation. It was my first entrance into
a genuine American household; my first meal at a Gentile--yes, a
Christian--board. Would I know how to behave properly? I do not know
whether I betrayed my anxiety; I am certain only that I was all eyes
and ears, that nothing should escape me which might serve to guide
me. This, after all, was a normal state for me to be in, so I suppose
I looked natural, no matter how much I stared. I had been accustomed
to consider my table manners irreproachable, but America was not
Polotzk, as my father was ever saying; so I proceeded very cautiously
with my spoons and forks. I was cunning enough to try to conceal my
uncertainty; by being just a little bit slow, I did not get to any
given spoon until the others at table had shown me which it was.
All went well, until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was
strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was
ham--forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch
it! I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt;
but I helped myself to a slice of ham, nevertheless, and hung my head
over my plate to hide my confusion. I was furious with myself for my
weakness. I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, who had
defied at least two religions in defence of free thought! And I began
to reduce my ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it
than anybody at the table.
Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy
as to talk. I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with
what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite
abhorrence of myself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox
hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in
the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as did I, sitting
there at my friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat.
And to think that so ridiculous a thing as a scrap of meat should be
the symbol and test of things so august! To think that in the mental
life of a half-grown child should be reflected the struggles and
triumphs of ages! Over and over and over again I discover that I am a
wonderful thing, being human; that I am the image of the universe,
being myself; that I am the repository of all the wisdom in the world,
being alive and sane at the beginning of this twentieth century. The
heir of the ages am I, and all that has been is in me, and shall
continue to be in my immortal self.