Mary Antin - The Promised Land (1912)

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

Mary Antin
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.

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

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

Mary Antin
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.

Mary Antin
A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.

Mary Antin
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.

Mary Antin
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!'

Mary Antin
It is not that I belong to the past, but that the past belongs to me.

Mary Antin
I want now to be of today. It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.

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

Mary Antin
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.

Mary Antin
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.

Mary Antin
Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking; and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks.

Mary Antin
It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

Mary Antin
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for today and tomorrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

Mary Antin
It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

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

Mary Antin
Outside America I should hardly be believed if I told how simply, in my experience, Dover Street merged into the Back Bay.

Mary Antin