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A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that he is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises.

Mary Antin

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Mary Antin
Age: 67 †
Born: 1881
Born: June 13
Died: 1949
Died: May 15
Author
Writer
Polatsk
Mary Antin Grabau
Eye
Solitary
Fact
Imperfect
Success
Immigrants
Family
Characteristics
Facts
Content
Aspiring
Take
Progress
Immigrant
Must
Alone
Rises
Thing
Eyes
Characteristic

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The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.
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A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.
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Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
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The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.
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There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.
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There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred and even the lucky ones had their troubles.
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What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.
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It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.
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You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.
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It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.
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A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.
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We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
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It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.
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