Jolson, Judy, and Jewish memory

Judaism, Fall, 2001 by Irving Saposnik

In memory of my mother Dorothy, who like many immigrants of her generation, crossed the rainbow bridge to America, and in New York, Miami, and Madison discovered her Emerald City.

Mayerke My Son

One blustery afternoon in the late 1940s, Louis B. Mayer and the elder of his two grandsons, Jeffrey Selznick, were having lunch.... Over a cup of boiling hot coffee.... Mayer became expansive and invited his grandson to share one of the most private moments of his personal life. That day was the anniversary of his mother's death, and he asked Jeffrey to join him as he said Kaddish in a service commemorating her yahrzeit.... [Jeffrey] and his grandfather... drove... into the heart of the Garment District, where Mayer stopped the car in front of a modest, somewhat dilapidated synagogue.... Once inside, Mayer put on a yarmulke and prayer shawl, and for over an hour, "with tears streaming down his cheeks," he sobbed and recited Kaddish and other prayers. (1)

THE HIDDEN JEW THAT HAUNTED LOUIS B. MAYER AND his fellow movie moguls was an ever-present dybbuk, never taking full possession but always lurking beneath the surface, ready to be released by a song, a yahrzeit, a flash of the past. In that moment of memory, the Jewish self revealed the American identity as, at least in part, a masquerade, a never fully-realized disguise that depended on a vigilant deception to make it work. For the moguls, as for many American Jews, the deception was their life and their life a deception. Only rarely and in private would that deception be relaxed to allow a glance behind the mask, a glimpse of the ancestral Jew in waiting.

As the successful sons of failed fathers and doting mothers, the Hollywood moguls personified the American Jewish success story writ large. In the studios they created, as well as in the films that they produced, they re-wrote their story in American terms, investing film after film with characters and incidents that reproduced their experience as new Americans emerging from their immigrant roots. (2) Some of these films became classics, landmarks of Hollywood history, touchstones of a transition that never was as smooth or as short lived as they had hoped. Even as they changed their Jewish names and their Jewish wives, they could never change their Jewish birth. Outwardly as American as their films, they could never deny their shadow selves.

More than the other moguls, Mayer was the model. Adopting July 4th as his birthday, celebrating Christmas as a national holiday, flirting with Catholicism shortly before his death, making patriotic speeches to affirm his American identity, he was ever re-inventing himself to move as far away from his origins as possible. If eclipsing his father was his ambition, revering his mother was his obsession. Mother love became the tie to a tradition that otherwise was ignored. Every year as he said Kaddish in secret, he became a Jewish son once again.

The conflict between the public and the private Jew is of course confined neither to Mayer nor to the moguls; it is a constant of American Jewish anxiety. In film and song, two major forms of American Jewish expression, this conflict is intriguingly presented. Longings that never disappeared, fears that could never be erased, doubts that were ever present, became the subtexts of popular entertainment, the counter-melody necessary to complete a truly national anthem. In their invention of popular entertainment, the moguls enabled themselves and others to place their new identities in native soil, to fit immigrant fears into American forms.

American film and song were re-invented when the Jews created Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. Moving pictures that began as an experiment became an industry, music that began as American pastoral became Afro-American jazz with a Yiddish krechts, a fusion of immigrant sounds that defined the new America. Jews not only turned film and song into a business, they gave them a new rhythm, an urban beat, a street-wise wisdom that throbbed with the noise, the grime, the grimness of the city. And, perhaps most ironically, these old-world Jews with Yiddish accents gave the American film a sound and the American song a new sophistication. Their immigrant voice became the voice of America.

Jolson Sings the Songs of A Nation

What care I who makes the laws of a nation?

Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs.

What care I who cares

For the world's affairs,

As long as I can sing its popular songs? (3)

The voice that Americans heard in the first talking film was the singing and spoken voice of still another immigrant son who rose above his roots. Al Jolson, like the Warner brothers who produced The Jazz Singerin 1927, was an immigrant Jew who re-invented himself as "the world's greatest entertainer." Jolson's life was an art, a fiction that enabled him to shape his Jewish identity under several disguises, most famously blackface. For all its present-day controversy, blackface was the disguise of choice for the twentieth-century Jewish performer. (4) And more than any other blackface performer--Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker--Jolson and blackface became synonymous. For Jolson it was his entrance to stage and film success, a mask that allowed him to achieve his fame and hide his fears.