The great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe
In 1899 a young Jewish woman published a harrowing account of her journey through Germany in 1894, based on Yiddish letters she had written during the journey. Maryashe (Mary) Antin’s travelogue “From Plotzk to Boston” stands out as one of the few detailed contemporary descriptions of a migrant journey from the Russian Empire to America. In the spring of 1894, when she was thirteen years old, Maryashe, together with her mother and sisters, left her hometown of Polotzk in northern Russia to join her father, who had moved to Boston in 1891.