ABSTRACT
The Promised Land is divided roughly into two halves; the first half of the text describes Antin’s early childhood in the shtetl of Polotzk, while the second half addresses Antin’s education and transformation after immigrating to the United States.4 What I call the “first half” of the autobiography consists of 162 pages. The “second half” contains 184 pages. These “halves” are joined by a single chapter of sixteen pages that describes the journey from Russia to the United States. From the very beginning of the autobiography, Antin reveals her awareness of boundaries, both physical boundaries and less tangible social ones. “When I was a little girl,” the first line of chapter 1 reads, “the world was divided into two parts; namely, Polotzk, the place where I lived, and a strange land called Russia” (1). Very soon, however, this geographical opposition becomes blurred for Antin; she soon realizes that between Polotzk and Russia an intermediate region exists, the rest of the Pale. When Antin is still a young child, she journeys by railroad to visit relatives in the town of Vitebsk, where she sees the River Dvinathe same river that flows through her home town of Polotz:
All my life I had seen the Dvina. How, then, could the Dvina be in Vitebsk?…It became clear to me that the Dvina went on and on, like a railroad track, whereas I had always supposed that it stopped where Polotzk stopped. I had never seen the end of Polotzk; I meant to, when I was bigger. But how could there be an end to Polotzk now? Polotzk was everything on both sides of the Dvina, as all my life I had known; and the Dvina, it now turned out, never broke off at all. It was very curious that the Dvina should remain the same, while Polotzk changed into Vitebsk! (2)
While Antin’s description of her childhood realization is certainly a romanticized one, its placement at the beginning of the autobiography is significant. Antin begins a work about immigration, about crossing borders and boundaries, by questioning whether boundaries are static. She continues her exposition on boundaries by discussing the effect of her realization. “The mystery of this transmutation [between Polotzk and Vitebsk] led to much fruitful thinking,” she claims,
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. The Dvina, and the railroad, went on beyond Vitebsk,—went on to Russia. Then was Russia more Polotzk? Was here also no dividing fence? (3)
Antin extrapolates from her realization and begins, like contemporary post-modern theorists, to question the rigidity of other boundaries that she had hitherto believed to be immutable. Writing about literal and psychological borderlands in the 1980s, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/ La Frontera, uses similar imagery when she writes that “the skin of the earth is seamless./The sea cannot be fenced,/el mar does not stop at borders” (3). Anzaldúa suggests that political and geographical borders-signified by the concrete manifestations of barbed wire, chain link fences-are politically-motivated human creations that are constructed “to distinguish us from them” (3; emphasis in original). For Antin, as for Anzaldúa, water provides an image for fluidity across such borders.5 Literal borders-between Polotzk and Vitebsk, between the Pale and the rest of Russia-yield when Antin realizes that the threads of the river and of the railroad do not observe such borders.
