If ever there was a prose hymnal inscribed to America by an immigrant to appear at just the right moment and to strike just the right note, surely it was The Promised Land. Published in 1912, Mary An tin's loveletter became a household word. In her lifetime, it was to go into thirty-four printings and sell 85,000 copies. At a time when immigration was averaging a million a year and there was increasing fear that the country was being polluted by degraded hordes from eastern and southern Europe, The Promised Land turned its thirty-one year old author into an instant celebrity. Amid mounting pressures for restriction, notes Oscar Handlin in a characteristically penetrating and succinct foreword to the Princeton imprint, the book ‘cast a beam of reassuring light’, reminding Americans that theirs was a great nation still.

Like Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, to which it was compared, The Promised Land is the testament of a pilgrim. While Masha merely became Mary, unlike the great black leader who in an inspired moment named himself after the nation's founder, both Jewish Mary and black Washington had discovered a predestined new world from which there was no returning. Thirteen years earlier, Mary's gifts had been unveiled in her first book, From Plotzk to Boston, more correctly Polotzk (Russia), rather than Plock (Poland), a typographical error, for which the precocious author forgave the printer. Originally composed in Yiddish by a thirteen year old, at the request of her uncle, as a series of letters detailing the epic journey, she then translated it into English. ‘Like most modem Jewesses who have written,’ wrote Israel Zangwill in the preface, ‘she is … destined to spiritual suffering.’ The noted English man of letters would be proved right, for Mary, the poet, was never to find her full voice. ‘All the processes of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development took place in my own soul,’ wrote Mary in The Promised Land (xxii) but she was unequipped to probe further. For her, the move from Russia was so gigantic a step out of a medieval old world into the modem new Canaan, from Tsarist despotism to the land of the free, that it left no place for an ongoing complexity. For a young woman with Mary's mind and sensibilities the opportunity to develop her individuality in ways barely foreshadowed in Polotzk was a sacred service.