Antin, Mary (Mary Antin Grabau)

Antin, Mary (Mary Antin Grabau) (1881–1949), born in Russian Poland, was brought to Boston (1894), where she attended public school and began to write poems which were published in local papers. While still a child, she wrote in Yiddish From Plotzk to Boston, an impressionistic description of life inside the Jewish Pale in Poland and the emigration of her family, which she translated into English for publication in 1899. She married a Columbia professor, and attended college at Columbia and Barnard (1901–4), but left before receiving a degree to become a settlement worker at Hale House in Boston. In 1912 she extended her early book to make The Promised Land, a full account of the customs and hardships of European Jews, as contrasted with the enlightenment and free opportunity they found in the U.S. A later work is They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914).