"Herald, Globe, Record, Tra-avel-er! Eh? Whatcher want, sis?"

The tall newsboy had to stoop to reach her. She was standing on the curbstone at a corner of Hanover Street in Boston, a manuscript clasped tight in her hand, afraid to step into the crossing. Every time she made a start, a clanging street car snatched up the way. The street signs were lost among the store signs and advertisements, and when she asked a passer-by the way she had to speak several times before anyone heard. Jews hurrying past with bearded chins on their chests shrugged at the name "Transcript" and kept shrugging until they were out of sight. Italians strolling behind their fruit carts lifted their heads, earrings gleaming, and waved a hand that pointed to all four points of the compass at once.

"Transcript? Sure!" In half a twinkling the newsboy had pulled a paper from his bundle to sell her. When she explained, he good-naturedly tucked it back, piloted her across, untangled the end of Washington Street for her, and sent her off with her nose seeking the spire of the Old South Church.

She was on her way to Newspaper Row. The manuscript was a poem about George Washington, and getting one perfect copy had cost her a dozen sheets of blue-ruled note paper.

I. A Girl from Polotzk

Her name was Mary Antin, and she was born in Polotzk (Polotsk, now in Belarus), inside the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement for Jews. Her father left for Boston in 1891; three years later he sent for the family. Six weeks after they left Polotzk, she wrote, "on a glorious May morning," they saw the Promised Land, "and my father received us in his arms." It was 1894, and she was nearly thirteen.

Two weeks after landing, the family followed a small wagon-load of household goods to Crescent Beach and spent the summer by the sea. When that business failed, they moved on to Chelsea. On Arlington Street her father rented a tenement with a store in the basement and stocked it with a few barrels of flour and sugar, a few boxes of crackers, a few gallons of kerosene and a showcase of penny candy. He put out a sign with a gilt-lettered warning, "Strictly Cash," and then, as was the custom on Arlington Street, gave credit to everyone. Her mother had no English yet but kept the counter anyway, cooking and washing in the kitchen behind the store between customers, who were used to waiting while she salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven.

The family could not afford to send both daughters to school. Before they even reached Boston it was settled that the elder sister, Frieda, would go to work and Mary would go to school. Frieda was the oldest, the strongest, and the only one of legal age to work. One September morning the two sisters stood for a moment in the doorway of the Arlington Street tenement. "It was I that ran away, on winged feet of joy and expectation," Antin wrote; "it was she whose feet were bound in the treadmill of daily toil. And I was so blind that I did not see that the glory lay on her, and not on me."

Her father took the children to school himself. "He would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States." Almost his first act in America had been to apply for naturalization, and at the earliest moment the law allowed, he became a citizen.

II. "Fellow Citizens"

The schedule of promotions could not hold her. Her teachers moved her up as fast as her English allowed, and by the middle of her second school year she was in the sixth grade. After the Christmas holidays the class began to study the life of Washington.

When the teacher read to them from a big book full of bookmarks, she sat rigid in her little chair, hands clasped on the edge of her desk, holding her breath so that no sigh of disappointment would escape when the teacher skipped the pages between the bookmarks. When her turn came to read aloud, her voice shook and the book trembled in her hands. She could not say the name George Washington without a pause.

Reading about the boy who would not lie to save himself from punishment, she felt for the first time truly sorry for her sins. She also felt suddenly small: she was not brave, she was afraid to go out when snowballs flew, and she could never be the first president of the United States. At the same time she felt ennobled. The patriotic readers were full of "Fellow Citizens." Her father had told her how he had become a citizen by naturalization and how she was one too, as his child. "Undoubtedly I was a Fellow Citizen, and George Washington was another."

In Polotzk there had been no place she could call "my country." It was exile. On pain of severe penalties, Jews had to hoist the Romanoff flag above their housetops to celebrate the coming of one of their oppressors, and they hated the soldier's uniform "to the last brass button." Now, in a Chelsea classroom, when everyone stood to sing "America," she shouted the words with all her might.

She drew her own conclusion in the book: "Naturalization, with us Russian Jews, may mean more than the adoption of the immigrant by America. It may mean the adoption of America by the immigrant."

III. The Red-and-Green Plaid

The school was preparing exercises for Washington's Birthday. She decided to write a poem.

It was harder than she expected. She could say that snow was white or grass was green without a dictionary, but now she needed the loftiest sentiments and the most abstract truths, words that were very new to her, and plenty of polysyllables. Where was she to find rhymes for "tyranny," "freedom" and "justice" with less than two years of English? The name she wanted to celebrate was the hardest of all. "Nothing but 'Washington' rhymed with 'Washington.'" She dug the words out of her heart, squeezed the rhymes out of her brain, and forced the missing syllables out of their hiding places in the dictionary.

When it was done, her father held the paper to the light to read it; his hands trembled and his eyes misted. Her teacher, Miss Dwight, was plainly astonished, asked her many questions, and invited her to read the poem to the class on the day of the celebration.

She stood before the class thin, pale and hollow-cheeked, with a shadow of short black curls on her brow and prominent, staring eyes. Plaids were in fashion, and her frock was a red-and-green plaid that did terrible things to her complexion. Heels together, hands glued to her sides, she lifted a small voice; her pronunciation was faulty and her delivery flat. In front of her sat forty classmates in clean blouses and extra frills.

The poem ran to a dozen and more stanzas. In one she spoke for the "luckless sons of Abraham": "Then we weary Hebrew children at last found rest / In the land where reigned Freedom, and like a nest / To homeless birds your land proved to us, and therefore / Will we gratefully sing your praise evermore." The boys and girls who had never been turned away from a door because of their father's religion sat as if spellbound. When she finished, they followed Miss Dwight's lead and applauded heartily.

By request she recited it again before several other classes. The teachers asked whether anyone had helped her. The girls all asked, "Mary Antin, how could you think of all those words?" None of them, she noted, thought of the dictionary.

IV. The Glazed-Glass Doors

Someone, perhaps her father, suggested the poem ought to be printed. It never occurred to her to mail it. "Personal presence moves the world," Dr. Edward Everett Hale used to say, and she wrote that it had always been her way to go in person. She crossed the Mystic River to Boston, walked up from the ferry slip, and came to that corner on Hanover Street.

The Transcript building was a waste of corridors tunnelled by a maze of staircases. The glazed-glass doors bore signs: "City Editor"; "Beggars and Peddlers not Allowed"; "Private—No Admittance"; "Don't Knock." Cuspidors punctuated the floor. She was coming down from the top story for the seventh time, still wondering what kind of editor a patriotic poem belonged to, when an untidy boy carrying broad paper streamers bustled through the corridor, whistling shrilly in defiance of a sign, and left a door ajar. She slipped in behind him and found herself in a room full of editors.

They were not what she had imagined. She had pictured someone like Mr. Jones, her principal, whose coat was always buttoned and whose fingernails were beautiful. These men were in shirt sleeves and smoking, and they did not turn in their revolving chairs to ask what they could do for her. The room was loud with typewriters, and nobody heard her "Please, can you tell me." At last one machine stopped, and its operator looked up through his own smoke and stared. She realized the hand holding the manuscript was moist and was afraid it would mark the paper.

"So you have brought us a poem, my child?"

"It's about George Washington," she repeated impressively. "Don't you want to read it?"

"I should be delighted, my dear, but the fact is—"

He did not take the paper. He stood up and called across the room: "Say, Jack! here is a young lady who has brought us a poem—about George Washington.—Wrote it yourself, my dear?—Wrote it all herself. What shall we do with her?"

Mr. Jack came over, and another man. The three put their hands in their pockets and consulted; she could not follow what they said, or why Mr. Jack laughed. A fourth man, writing at a desk nearby, broke in: "That's enough, boys, that's enough. Take the young lady to Mr. Hurd."

Mr. Hurd was away on vacation. She was sent on to several other editors in several offices, and none was the proper editor for a poem about George Washington. At last an elderly editor suggested she give up on the Transcript and try the Herald, across the way.

She crossed Washington Street. At the Herald the first editor she spoke to took her paper, offered her a seat, read the poem faster than she could have, said it was very nice, asked her some questions, made notes on a slip he pinned to the manuscript, and promised to print it soon and send her a copy. As she left she could not help giving him her hand, although she had seen no handshaking anywhere on Newspaper Row.

V. The Cash Drawer

When the paper arrived, the whole house pounced on it. The poem was not all over the front page; it was tucked away in the middle of the voluminous sheet. But once they found it, it looked just like real poetry, not at all as if someone they knew had written it. It was introduced by a biographical sketch of the author, the material for which the friendly editor had drawn out of her during their talk. And her name was at the bottom.

Her father took all the change out of the cash drawer and went out to buy up the Herald. He did not count the pennies. He bought every copy he could find and gave them away to friends, relatives and acquaintances, to everyone who could read and to some who could not. For weeks he carried the clipping in his breast pocket and worked it into conversation whenever he could. He treasured it, she wrote, as for years he had treasured the letters she sent him from Polotzk.

On the street and in the schoolyard people pointed her out: "That's Mary Antin. She had her name in the paper." What she heard was: "This is she who loves her country and worships George Washington."

VI. What She Understood Later

In February 1912 this part of her story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly as "The Making of a Citizen." There she put it more bluntly: "Years passed before I understood that the editor printed my verses as a curiosity and space-filler." In the book published later that year the sentence is gone, replaced by the long day on Newspaper Row.

She did not hide other things either. Her first published piece, a composition called "Snow," was sent by her first teacher, Miss Dillingham, to the journal Primary Education with a note calling it the work of "a Russian child twelve years old, who had studied English only four months." By her June 1881 birthday she was by then past thirteen. The editors of the Library of America say her father had understated her age so that she could have two more years of grade school.

Again and again the book grieves for her sister. Frieda had come to America a little too late for the long American girlhood. Before the family had been two years in the country she was engaged, and she married at seventeen.

Her father's business did not turn around. After a year or so in Chelsea the ledger was on the wrong side again, and the family moved to Wheeler Street in Boston's South End, and then to Dover Street. "In Dover Street," she wrote, "there was often no loaf on the table."

VII. The Rent

On Dover Street she had one or two more poems printed, "but nobody had paid for my poems—yet." The rent was three and a half dollars a week, always behind, and the landlady was very angry. Someone introduced her to the editor of the Boston Searchlight, who offered her half of every one-dollar annual subscription she sold. She did the sum: seven subscribers a week, one a day, and the rent was paid.

Early one Saturday in the fall she set out with a neatly folded copy of the paper and started in a great office building on Tremont Street. She lost the first half hour wandering the corridors, reading the names on the doors. Once again she was in a building full of doors, looking for the right one. One man told her he did not think it was a nice business for a girl, going through the offices like that.

Past noon she found an open door. Mr. Frederick A. Strong had just come back from lunch. He heard her out good-naturedly and asked how much her commission was.

"Fifty cents, sir."

"Well, I'll tell you what I will do. I don't care to subscribe, but here's a quarter for you."

She choked and turned to go. She had been taken for a beggar. Mr. Strong jumped up, apologized, and begged her to sit and rest. She had been on her feet since morning without lunch, so she sat. They talked about the Latin School and about Russia, and an hour later he shook her hand formally at the door. She did not add his name to her subscription list. Outside, the clock on Park Street Church said past two, and she had only one half dollar of her own in her pocket. It was Saturday, and in the evening the landlady would come.

VIII. The Copy That Was Kept

In 1899 she translated her long Yiddish letters to her uncle about the 1894 journey into English and published her first book, From Plotzk to Boston. In 1912 The Promised Land came out, became a best seller, and made her a writer who spoke for immigrants. She died at Suffern, New York, on May 15, 1949.

She had long since laughed at the Washington poem herself: its impossible metres, grandiose phrases and wordy repetitions. Years before, she had thrown her only copy into the wastebasket. The copy she was turning over as she wrote The Promised Land was on loan from Miss Dwight. Her teacher had kept those dozen awkward stanzas all along.

Notes on fact and narrative

1. Every scene, line of dialogue and feeling here comes from Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) or the other sources listed below; nothing is invented. The day on Newspaper Row (the newsboy, the Transcript building, the editors, Mr. Hurd, the Herald editor) rests on her account alone, written about sixteen years later; no independent contemporary record was found.

2. Date of the poem: the book gives no year, only "the middle of my second year in school" and "after the Christmas holidays," and the poem was written for the school's Washington's Birthday exercises. Since she entered school in September 1894, the exercises probably fell around February 1896; the Heath Anthology author page says she published her first poem in the Boston Herald "at fifteen," which also points to 1896. The timeline shows only 1896. The exact Herald issue has not been seen and remains to be checked.

3. "The Making of a Citizen," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1912, is an earlier version of chapter XI. The "curiosity and space-filler" sentence is taken from the opening paragraph of that article on The Atlantic's website (checked through a search-engine excerpt; the full text could not be read). Chapter XI of The Promised Land does not contain it.

4. Age: Miss Dillingham's note to Primary Education, which says "twelve years old," is reproduced in chapter X of The Promised Land. Using the birth date given by English Wikipedia (June 13, 1881), "Snow," written after four months of English, dates to early 1895, when she was past thirteen. The claim that her father understated her age to get her two more years of grade school, and that she later turned this into a short story, "The Lie," comes from the Library of America's Story of the Week introduction (September 2018); The Promised Land itself does not say so.

5. Her birth and death, her father's emigration in 1891, her marriage and her death at Suffern are from English Wikipedia, "Mary Antin," and the Jewish Women's Archive entry (Pamela S. Nadell) it cites, at second hand. That From Plotzk to Boston (1899) was translated from her 1894 Yiddish letters to her uncle, and that The Promised Land went through 34 printings and sold almost 85,000 copies in her lifetime, are from the Library of America introduction.

6. The story stops in the Dover Street years (the book gives no year). Her entry into the Latin School, her friendship with Dr. Hale and Hale House are told in chapters XVI–XX and are not followed here. The book's optimism and its poverty are both reported as written, without judgment.

Sources and versions

1. Main source: Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), Project Gutenberg eBook #20885 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20885; plain text sha256 cd97173a5f6b3e230267f3bef13e2eac121cfdb0f1ef12a8e21b718249c787a0, downloaded October 29, 2026); chapters VIII–XI and XV–XVII read. Published in the United States in 1912; public domain in the US.

2. Mary Antin, "The Making of a Citizen," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1912 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1912/02/the-making-of-a-citizen/644506/); opening paragraph only, see note 3.

3. Library of America, Story of the Week, "My Country" by Mary Antin (September 2018, https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/09/my-country.html, consulted October 29, 2026); editor's introduction, used only for her age, first book and sales.

4. English Wikipedia, "Mary Antin" (consulted October 29, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Antin), used only for dates, at second hand; Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., author page (Cengage), used only for "at fifteen." Map coordinates from the corresponding English Wikipedia articles.

5. Chapters: the May morning arrival and Crescent Beach are in chapters VIII–IX; the Arlington Street store, Frieda going to work, the first school day, her father's naturalization, Miss Dillingham and "Snow" in chapters IX–X; the Washington lessons, "Fellow Citizens," the Romanoff flag, writing the poem, the plaid dress, the recitation, Newspaper Row, the Herald, her father buying up the paper, the clipping and Miss Dwight's copy in chapter XI; the move to Wheeler Street in chapter XIV; Frieda's engagement and marriage at seventeen in chapter XV; Dover Street in chapter XVI; the rent, the Searchlight, the Tremont Street building and Mr. Strong in chapter XVII.