From Plotzk to Boston
Author: Mary Antin
Year: 1899
Keywords: Biography, Immigrants, Poland, USA, Jews
Source: Project Gutenberg
With a foreword by Israel Zangwill
Mary Antin's vivid description of all she and her dear ones went through,
enables us to see almost with our own eyes how the invasion of America appears
to the impecunious invader. It is thus "a human document" of considerable
value, as well as a promissory note of future performance. The quick senses of
the child, her keen powers of observation and introspection, her
impressionability both to sensations and complex emotions—these are the very
things out of which literature is made; the raw stuff of art. Her capacity to
handle English—after so short a residence in America—shows that she possesses
also the instrument of expression. More fortunate than the poet of the Ghetto,
Morris Rosenfeld, she will have at her command the most popular language in the
world, and she has already produced in it passages of true literature,
especially in her impressionistic rendering of the sea and the bustling
phantasmagoria of travel.
(Israel Zangwill)