Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
I do not know when my parents found opportunity to review together the history of Polotzk in the three years past, for we children had no patience with the subject; my mother's narrative was constantly interrupted by irrelevant questions, interjections, and explanations. The first meal was an object lesson of much variety.
Memory may take a rest while I copy from a contemporaneous document the story of the great voyage. In accordance with my promise to my uncle, I wrote, during my first months in America, a detailed account of our adventures between Polotzk and Boston. Ink was cheap, and the epistle, in Yiddish, occupied me for many hot summer hours.
She lived in state, with many servants and dependents, wearing silk dresses on week days, and setting silver plate before the meanest guest. The women of Polotzk were breathless over her wardrobe, counting up how many pairs of embroidered boots she had, at fifteen rubles a pair.
When I had exhausted the books, I began on the old volumes of a Russian periodical which I found on a shelf in my room. There was a high stack of these paper volumes, and I was so hungry for books that I went at them greedily, fearing that I might not get through before I had to return to Polotzk. I read every spare minute of the day, and most of the night.
The most pious men in Polotzk danced the night through, their earlocks dangling, the tails of their long coats flying in a pious ecstasy. Beggars swarmed among the bidden guests, sure of an easy harvest where so many hearts were melted by piety. The wedding jester excelled himself in apt allusions to the friends and relatives who brought up their wedding presents at his merry invitation.
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.
I expected to see, if I looked over my shoulder, a bearded philosopher in a drooping mantle, surrounded by beautiful youths with wreathed locks. Everything I read in school, in Latin or Greek, everything in my history books, was real to me here, in this courtyard set about with stately columns. Here is where I liked to remind myself of Polotzk, the better to bring out the wonder of my life.
I am forgetting the consolation I had, in this matter of names, from the use of my surname, which I have had no occasion to mention until now. I found on my arrival that my father was "Mr. Antin" on the slightest provocation, and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions alone. And so I was "Mary Antin," and I felt very important to answer to such a dignified title.
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.
"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 altogether. 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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking