Book Description

From Plotzk to Boston is an 1899 memoir by author and immigration activist Mary Antin (1881-1949). It chronicles her emigration from her hometown of Polotsk in the Russian Empire (now modern Belarus) to the United States in 1894, focusing primarily on her observations of life in unfamiliar surroundings, the emotional trials endured by her family, and the hardships that accompanied their passage to and eventual settlement in Boston, Massachusetts. Her first major publication, it laid the groundwork for her later autobiography and most famous work, The Promised Land (1912). Compiled from a series of letters that Antin wrote to her uncle describing her family's journey to America in 1894, From Plotzk to Boston was inspired by the difficulties that compelled them to leave their homeland as well as Antin's own literary upbringing.