I Killed My Grandmother: Mary Antin, Amos Oz, and the Autobiography of a Name

This chapter explores Sana Krasikov’s short story collection One More Year (2008) and Anya Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) in order to develop a comparative approach to representations of irregular and unauthorized migration, a form of movement that has been largely identified with migrants from Mexico and Central America. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich represents ethnically and racially diverse protagonists from Russia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, who arrive in the United States on nonimmigrant visas and become irregular or undocumented. These two works move beyond the themes of assimilation and family migration that dominated twentieth-century cultural productions by eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent, such as Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska. Their work laid the foundation for a literature of assimilation to a middle-class white US racial identity that became fully available to European immigrants by the mid-twentieth century. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich emphasizes post-Soviet characters’ experiences of diminished access to the US labor market, residency, and citizenship rights, and thus positions itself in the larger context of contemporary US immigrant writing.

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Rethinking Mary Antin and The Promised Land

Modern Jewish Women Writers in America ◽

10.1057/9780230604841_2 ◽

2007 ◽

pp. 17-27

Author(s):

Jules Chametzky

Keyword(s):

Mary Antin ◽

Promised Land

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Mary Antin: Progressive Optimism against The Odds

The Cambridge History of American Literature ◽

10.1017/chol9780521497312.045 ◽

2002 ◽

pp. 411-421

Keyword(s):

Mary Antin

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Mary Antin

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0023 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Maria Karafilis

Keyword(s):

Mary Antin

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The Possessive Self in Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska: Gender, Jewishness, and the Assumptions of Americanization

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300006384 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 23 ◽

pp. 357-377

Author(s):

Blanche H. Gelfant

Keyword(s):

Evolutionary History ◽

Public Library ◽

Anzia Yezierska ◽

Founding Father ◽

George Washington ◽

Mary Antin ◽

Promised Land ◽

American Citizenship ◽

Original Emphasis ◽

The Creation

Mary Antin was not modest in her use of the possessive case in The Promised Land — in her iterations of Mine, Mine, Mine. While still a schoolgirl, Antin asserted that everything she saw in the Boston Public Library, a “treasure house” of wisdom and art, was “Mine.” As the child of a newly naturalized American, she felt entitled to claim possession; the library and its treasured holdings were “Mine,” she said, “because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine … My palace — mine! … This is mine” (266, original emphasis). By the time Antin came to the soaring conclusion of The Promised Land, she had exchanged her natural (and naturalized) father for the country's Founding Father, and as the child of George Washington, she claimed as her “heritage” everything in human evolutionary history that had led to the creation of America and everything yet to be evolved. “I am the youngest of America's children,” she wrote, “and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage … Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future” (286). In swooping hyperbole, Antin equated American citizenship with possession, and possession with inheritance, property, and rights: with a treasure house in which she “had a right to be … at home” (266).

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