You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother. By Joyce Antler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv, 321 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-514787-2.)
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25095254
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish Identity and Society
ResumoIn this well-researched and very readable book, Joyce Antler traces the stereotypes of Jewish mothers from the Eastern European immigrant generation to the early twenty-first century, focusing on the origins of those stereotypes and how they changed—or not—over the years. She makes good use of an impressive variety of sources, including songs, plays, radio and television shows, movies, newspapers, novels, academic books, memoirs, oral histories, and stand-up comedy. In the early twentieth century, popular culture portrayed the East European Jewish mother as the self-sacrificing matriarch who held her struggling immigrant family together emotionally and, often, financially, and nurtured her children with endless and unconditional love. This self-sacrificing mother was immortalized in the sentimental song “My Yiddishe Mama,” introduced to a teary-eyed American public (Jewish and otherwise) by the singer Sophie Tucker in 1925. Antler contrasts image and reality throughout the book, and she notes that when the song was introduced in 1925 the “Yiddishe mama” was already an object of nostalgia for a socially mobile immigrant community. Tucker herself was not a “Yiddishe mama,” but a successful entertainer, a “Red-Hot Mama full of desires and appetites and with a raucous sense of humor” (p. 20).
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