Bar-Mitzvah

Celia Adler, doyenne of the Yiddish stage, gives a haunting performance as a new immigrant forced to give up her son. Obsessed with the thought of reuniting with him, she spends the next 25 years searching, pining, and bewailing her loss.

Mothers of Today features the first motion picture performance of radio star Esther Field, best known on the airwaves of the 1930s as the 'Yiddishe Mama.' The film exemplifies the Yiddish film genre of shund, a brand of popular entertainment which appealed to working-class Jewish-American immigrant audiences with broadly-drawn, sentimental stories that reflected the daily life and culture of a distinctively American Yiddish community. While the shund films were invariably low-budget (and low-brow) affairs, these humble productions formed an important part of life in the United States for their audience.