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Updated: June 2, 2025
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.
The boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world was not, as I had supposed, a physical barrier, like the fence which divided our garden from the street. The world went like this now: Polotzk more Polotzk more Polotzk Vitebsk! And Vitebsk was not so different, only bigger and brighter and more crowded. And Vitebsk was not the end.
But she was to blame for voluntarily exiling herself from Jewish society for years at a time, to live among pork-eaters, and copy the bold ways of Gentile women. And so while they pitied her childlessness, the women of Polotzk regarded her misfortune as perhaps no more than a due punishment. Hode, poor woman, felt a hungry heart beneath her satin robes.
In the mediæval position of the women of Polotzk education really had no place. A girl was "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women.
My mother ran away every time the shadchan came, and she begged to be left as she was, and cried, and invoked her mother's support. But her mother, for the first time in her history, refused to take the daughter's part. She joined the enemy the family and the shadchan and my mother saw that she was doomed. Of course she submitted. What else could a dutiful daughter do, in Polotzk?
The time had come to find him a well-to-do father-in-law, who should support him and his wife and children, while he continued to study in the seminary. After the usual conferences between parents and marriage brokers, my father was betrothed to an undertaker's daughter in Polotzk.
The guests included some of the finest people in Polotzk; for while my grandfather was not quite at the top of the social scale, he had business connections with those that were, and they all turned out for the wedding of his only daughter, the men in silk frock coats, the women in all their jewelry. The bridegroom's aunts and cousins came in full force.
The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had filled my lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond. Child though I was, Polotzk, when I came back, was too small for me. And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near. My father's letters warned us to prepare for the summons, and we lived in a quiver of expectation.
After one term of this, he tried to go on with his own studies, sometimes in Yuchovitch, sometimes in Polotzk, as opportunity dictated. He made the journey to Polotzk beside his father, jogging along in the springless wagon on the rutty roads.
The well-versed metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate of good citizenship. He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk.
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