Weaving introspection with political commentary, biography with history, The Promised Land, first published in 1912, brings to life the transformation of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant into an American citizen. Mary Antin recounts "the process of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development that took place in [her] own soul" and reveals the impact of a new culture and new standards of behavior on her family. A feeling of division-between Russia and America, Jews and Gentiles, Yiddish and English-ever-present in her narrative is balanced by insights, amusing and serious, into ways to overcome it. In telling the story of one person, The Promised Land illuminates the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Mary Antin was born into a Jewish family in Polotsk in Russian-ruled Poland. Her family moved to the United States when she was still a child and she lived in Boston and then New York, where she attended the Teachers College of Columbia University and Barnard University. The publication of her autobiography, The Promised Land, made her famous and she lectured widely about the meaning of assimilation and her own story. She died in 1949.