Życie społeczne Żydów połockich w drugiej połowie XIX wieku w interpretacji Mary Antin

Abstract

This article focuses on the first part of Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land. She returns in this work to her childhood in Polotzk, from which her family migrated at the end of the 19th century to the United States. Although her memoir cannot be treated as a strictly archival source of factual information, it neverthless reflects her memories and emotions connected with the life in a shtetl where Jewish existence was determined by the politics of the Czarist Russia. Attention is given to the selected important aspects of social life of the Jewish community in which Mary (then called Mashke/Malke/Maryashe) grew up: limitations imposed by the Pale of Settlement, mechanisms of survival, horrors of the army service for Jewish men, and restrictions in the education of Jewish girls and boys.