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Name: From Plotzk to Boston

Author: Mary Antin
Year: 1899
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ISBNs:
9781558763104
1558763104

Mary Antin was born in Polotsk, Russia in 1881. Like many Jews in Russia, her family suffered under the progroms of the late 19th century and tried to emigrate to America. Leaving Russia was forbidden, and many Jews had to be smuggled across border to Germany before travelling by train to the port of Hamburg, where they were brought to emigration halls and put on ships to America.

When Antin was thirteen when her family completed this migration and settled in the slums of Boston. Despite many hardships, she attended the prestigious Boston Latin School and wrote her first biography which was published in 1894 under the title 'From Plotzk to Boston'. Told in a simple way, this story reveals Antin's acute powers of observation. In 1912 she wrote her famous and more scholarly autobiography' The Promised Land' and became a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party.