One of the great strengths of the text is its embrace of contradictory elements: in Boston, the Antins' tenement apartment is squalid, yet the school is wonderful. Wells avoids rhetoric, striking home with powerful details and images: an official measures her brother's nose with a ruler (""Only short-nosed Jewish boys could attend school"") after Masha's father leaves for America, the first step in the whole family's emigration, the czar's police confiscate all their possessions (""every rickety chair and pair of shoes in our house"").
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Masha (her name was later Americanized to Mary) begins with a description of her family's life under the czarist regime. Short passages from Anton's memoir The Promised Land appear in margins here, complementing Wells's first-person text. Among a profusion of books about turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish emigrants, Wells's (Mary on Horseback) and Andreasen's (Eagle Song) story about Mary Antin (1881-1949) stands out for its exceptional economy and tenderness.
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