MARY ANTIN

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.

One positive command he gave us: You shall love and honor your emperor. In every congregation a prayer must be said for the czar's health, or the chief of police would close the synagogue.

The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

As we moved along in a little procession, I was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, my father said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns.

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.

On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.

The czar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might do, except pay tribute and die.

The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family.

In the evening of the first day my father conducted us to the public baths.

You heard on all sides that the brightest Jewish children were turned down if the examining officers did not like the turn of their noses.

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.

If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshiped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them.

No, the czar did not want us in the schools.

You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

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.

American opportunity, the treasure no thief could touch … It was the one thing he [her father] was able to promise us when he sent for us; surer, safer than bread or shelter.

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.

[I began to unload] the pyramid of honors, civic and literary, which had been heaped on me by the headlong process of rewarding a popular success. One day, I sat down and wrote a wholesale lot of letters of resignation. When I finished, I didn't belong to a single authors club or patriotic society. I was myself again, whatever that was.

There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.

The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever I go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.

What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.