ren on the street, for real American machine-made garments, and
issued forth glorified in each other's eyes.

With our despised immigrant clothing we shed also our impossible
Hebrew names. A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in
American experience, put their heads together and concocted American
names for us all. Those of our real names that had no pleasing
American equivalents they ruthlessly discarded, content if they
retained the initials. My mother, possessing a name that was not
easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of
Annie. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and
Dora, respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name
they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full,
Mashke for short, Russianized into Marya (_Mar-ya_), my friends said
that it would hold good in English as _Mary_; which was very
disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name
like the others.

I am forgetting the consolation I had, in this matter of names, from
the use of my surname, which I have had no occasion to mention until
now. I found on my arrival that my father was "Mr. Antin" on the
slightest provocation, and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions
alone. And so I was "Mary Antin," and I felt very important to answer
to such a dignified title. It was just like America that even plain
people should wear their surnames on week days.

As a family we were so diligent under instruction, so adaptable, and
so clever in hiding our deficiencies, that when we made the journey to
Crescent Beach, in the wake of our small wagon-load of household
goods, my father had very little occasion to admonish us on the way,
and I am sure he was not ashamed of us. So much we had achieved toward
our Americanization during the two weeks since our landing.

Crescent Beach is a name that is printed in very small type on the
maps of the environs of Boston, but a life-size strip of sand curves
from Winthrop to Lynn; and that is historic ground in the annals of my
family. The place is now a popular resort for holiday crowds, and is
famous under the name of Revere Beach. When the reunited Antins made
their stand there, however, there were no boulevards, no stately
bath-houses, no hotels, no gaudy amusement places, no illuminations,
no showmen, no tawdry rabble. There was only the bright clean sweep of
sand, the summer sea, and the summer sky. At high tid