Jolson, the Jazz Singer and the Jewish mother: or how my Yiddishe momme became my mammy

Judaism, Fall, 1994 by Irv Saposnik

Blackface transferred identities from the Jewish mother as well as her son. Unwilling to leave her behind, Jewish sons and daughters disguised her as well as themselves. Blackface, like jazz, became a metaphor for American, perhaps its code word. In time, blackface and black music overshadowed the Yiddish world. Yiddish writers of song or story, as well as Yiddish mothers and their children, had no choice but to transform themselves or be left hopelessly behind. Mothers who wished to join their children had to "go native."

"America gonif" was about to rob the Jewish mother of her Yiddishkeit. What Yiddish song had created was about to end. "A Brivele der Mamen" (1907) is only one of many Yiddish songs in which the Jewish mother was used as a reminder of the separation that emigration enforced. Its three stanzas, sung to a plaintive tune, foreshadow what was later to become commingled with nostalgia for the old home. The sadness of separation, the son's lack of responsibility, the mother's complaint that in eight years he hadn't written her one letter, much of which later became comic shtick, was in 1907 no matter for laughter. The experience was too fresh, the pain too acute. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but the head forgets too soon.

A song of the immigrant generation, "A Brivele der Mamen," expressed the fears of both parents and children. The mother who waits in silence for a letter that never comes is seen as a tragic figure, the embodiment of a Yiddishkeit as abandoned as she. The son, perhaps unwittingly, becomes increasingly enmeshed in the allure of America, and forges a new life without any acknowledgment of the life and people he left behind. Description becomes admonition, with just a faint hope; perhaps it was not too late to change direction.

But of course it was too late. Mothers continued to be left behind, even if the separation was only a borough apart. After Jewish immigration came Jewish mobility, and the Lower East Side became the old country. By 1925, when the play of The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway, moving away had become a commonplace of Jewish-American life. And the songs people sang reflected their ambivalent feelings toward what was both painful and necessary.

"My Yiddishe Mamma," is as expressive of twenties' sentiment as "A Brivele der Mamen" had been of turn-of-the-century attitudes. Written by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack in 1925, it became particularly identified with Sophie Tucker, especially after she recorded it in both English and Yiddish versions on two sides of a single record. Two languages for a mixed generation. Side by side, Yiddish and English establish a balance between old and new, between parents and children, between past and future. Parents and children are in transit, and the Yiddishe Momme, while no longer abandoned, is put in her place.

Or perhaps, more accurately places, for the Yiddish and English versions offer different mothers for different audiences. The English Yiddishe Momme is placed in "a humble East Side tenement," and the singer reaches across "the trails of Time" to recollect the "three flights up in the rear ... where my childhood days were spent." Separation has set in; the singer has grown up, and grown away. The past is remembered with affection, but it remains irretrievable. The Jewish mother, like the old shtetl, lies buried in time.