THE PROMISED LAND

MARY ANTIN

(From Chapter IX of _The Promised Land_)


During his three years of probation, my father had made a number of
false starts in business. His history for that period is the history of
thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands
untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression
in their native land. Dozens of these men pass under your eyes every
day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest affairs to notice
the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the repugnance with which
you shrink from their touch. You see them shuffle from door to door with
a basket of spools and buttons, or bending over the sizzling irons in a
basement tailor shop, or rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart
from curb to curb, at the command of the burly policeman. "The Jew
peddler!" you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your
thoughts, never dreaming that the sordid drama of his days may have a
moral that concerns you. What if the creature with the untidy beard
carries in his bosom his citizenship papers? What if the cross-legged
tailor is supporting a boy in college who is one day going to mend your
state constitution for you? What if the ragpicker's daughters are
hastening over the ocean to teach your children in the public schools?
Think, every time you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was
born thousands of years before the oldest native American; and he may
have something to communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a