From Plotzk to Boston -- First Edition in Publisher's Cloth
Boston, Mass. W. B. Clarke & Co., 1899. First Edition. Hardcover. Small 8vo. Pp. [1-7], 8-80. Three-page foreword by Israel Zangwill. Bound in the publisher's red pebble-grain cloth, gilt lettering stamped on spine. Bookseller's tag on rear pastedown (Gotham Book Mart). General wear to extremities of cloth, with corners worn through, spine darkened and with wear to head and tail. Despite those factors, book remains well bound and text block sturdy and bright. Now protected with a clear, archival sleeve. Rare in the first edition. Good+. Item #5044 Antin's story is well known: rough handling by German gendarmes, unexpected demands of money, fumigation due to the 1892-94 cholera outbreak, and uneasy sailing in steerage, is presented with acuity, charm and humor. First written in Yiddish at age 11, then translated by Antin after two years of grammar school English, the work was later incorporated into an expanded memoir, The Promised Land (1912). The book is dedicated to Hattie Hecht, who persuaded printer Philip Cowen, editor of the American Hebrew, that Antin's manuscript possessed ample literary merit. Indeed, a line from Antin's preface shows exactly that, writing that her family moved "from tyranny to democracy, from darkness to light, from bondage and persecution to freedom, justice and equality.”
Antin's perceptive piece of juvenilia documenting her family's emigration from Polatsk, Belarus (then Poltzk, in Czarist Russia) via Hamburg by steamship to Boston, where they reunited with their father after an absence of three years, is presented here in a sturdy first edition in the original publisher's cloth.
Price: $1,100.00