From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

This year, the 1938 Yiddish film classic Mamele, starring Molly Picon, perhaps the world’s best-known Yiddish actress, was screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival in a version newly restored by the National Center for Jewish Film.

But the first rediscovery of this film occurred in September 1978, when YIVO released the first restored version of Mamele to a sold-out audience at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. The original reels for the movie had been lost and it had been several decades since the film had been screened. But an almost complete copy of the film was located, from which the restored copy was put together in a special project mounted by YIVO.

Mamele was directed by Joseph Green, a Lodz-born Yiddish actor, who had immigrated to the United States in 1924. In the 1930s, he returned to Poland to make four Yiddish films: Mamele, A brivele der mamen (A Letter to Mother), Yidl mitn fidl (Yidl With a Fiddle), and Der puremshpiler (The Purim Player). All the films were made with American Jewish audiences in mind.

Among the speakers at the 1978 screening were Eric Goldman, then YIVOs’ film curator, as well as a fellow of the Max Weinreich Center, film consultant and Audrey Kupferberg, film archivist at the American Film Institute.

Learn more about Mamele.

Watch a clip from Mamele, as restored by the National Center for Jewish Film.

Buy the video.

Learn more about the Molly Picon Papers at YIVO.