- Mary Antin’s (1881-1949) novel The Promised Land (1912) is a compelling account of immigrant passage to and settlement in America. Antin arrived in Boston in 1894, three years after her father fled the Russian Jewish Pale of Settlement in search of a better life. Her autobiographical account describes a metamorphosis from a provincial, inquisitive girl of the small town of Polotzk to a fervently patriotic American teenager. Antin’s work reflects her extraordinary sensitivity to the trauma of immigration and acculturation Page 307 →experienced by Eastern European Jews. Throughout her life, she remained a champion of the stranger and an advocate for liberal immigration legislation. Her book They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration argued that open immigration is integral to the ideal of American democracy. Antin was the voice for the silent, aware that “while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and die unheard.” She described herself in The Promised Land as “one... born among the simple with a taste for self-revelation. The man or woman thus endowed must speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.”
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