Molly Picon
Molly Picon was a prominent American actress and performer known for her significant contributions to Yiddish theater and film. Born in New York City, she began her entertainment career at a young age, performing in vaudeville and later expanding her repertoire to include Yiddish theater both in the United States and Europe. After marrying Jacob Kalich, a knowledgeable figure in Yiddish theater, Picon gained deeper insights into the cultural nuances of Yiddish performance, which helped her establish a unique artistic identity. Throughout her career, she traveled extensively, performing in various countries, including during World War II, when she entertained U.S. military personnel and displaced communities.
Picon was not only an actress but also a creative force, composing nearly one hundred songs and adapting scripts for her performances. Her notable roles included Yenta, the matchmaker in the film adaptation of "Fiddler on the Roof," and her work on Broadway in productions like "Milk and Honey." Her performances resonated with audiences by highlighting Jewish identity in the face of changing cultural landscapes. Picon's legacy endures as a symbol of the rich traditions of Yiddish theater, celebrating the humor and humanity that defined her work until her passing in 1992 at the age of ninety-three.
Subject Terms
Molly Picon
- Born: June 1, 1898
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: April 6, 1992
- Place of death: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Actor, singer, and writer
From the vaudeville stage to Broadway, Picon kept alive the legacies of the Yiddish theaters of Europe and the United States.
Early Life
Molly Picon (pih-KAHN) was born in New York City to Clara Ostrow and Louis Picon. Louis was nearly absent from Picon’s life, except for occasional appearances, so she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. Picon’s connection to the world of entertainment began when her mother took in work as a seamstress for one of the Yiddish theaters in Philadelphia, and Picon’s first performance came on a city trolley car en route to an amateur evening at one of the local theaters. Her vaudeville career in America consisted of traveling across country with a variety of troupes and doing a mixture of songs, acrobatics, dancing, and dramatic readings.
Life’s Work
Picon entered American theater at a time when the mixed-format vaudeville shows were still popular, and she began her career as a child, doing small roles at the age of six, under the name of Baby Margaret. Her diminutive size made her stand out from the other female stars of the Yiddish theater, many of whom were tall and full-figured, enabling her to play many roles as a youngster or waif.
Her first introduction to the Yiddish theater of Europe came after her marriage to Jacob Kalich in 1919. Prior to immigrating to the United States, he had worked at Bucharest’s Zshignitza Theater, the birthplace of classic Yiddish theater, and he was knowledgeable about its body of work, its history, and its traditions. He decided that Picon should take her talent abroad, to work the Yiddish theater circuit of Europe, gaining experience and establishing herself as a recognized artist, which she did after they were married. Through him, she was introduced to the formal European pronunciation of Yiddish (different from the sound of the language she had grown up with), and she learned to read the tastes of audiences that had a different expression of being Jewish than the one prevalent in the United States.
At this time there was little crossover between the American and the European Yiddish theaters in terms of training. Because of this, Picon’s first tour of Europe helped her to forge a unique identity as a performer. She traveled widely from 1920 to 1922, and in the process she witnessed the efforts of Yiddish culture in Europe as it struggled to adapt to the post-World War I world. This European trip was the first of many overseas journeys, and she eventually performed in places as varied as Argentina and South Africa. During World War II and the Korean War, she appeared at U.S. military bases and at camps for displaced people. She and her husband were also deeply involved in raising funds for the state of Israel through bond sales, and they traveled to Europe in 1946 to bring aid directly from the Jews of New York to the surviving Yiddish communities. Their trip took them to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In the ruins of Warsaw and other Polish cities, Picon saw the Yiddish theaters where she had performed in the rubble and knew that her audiences had been killed in the concentration camps.
In addition to being a performer of standard works of Yiddish repertoire, Picon was a creative artist in her own right, composing the words and music to nearly one hundred songs, beginning in 1929, mainly in Yiddish but also in English. She made recordings of standard songs from the Yiddish theater, beginning in 1938. With her husband, who doubled as playwright for several of her most popular plays, such as Yonkele and Oy Is Dus a Leben! (1942), she worked on adapting scripts for performance, in some cases making revisions almost until opening night. Upon her return to the United States, she brought her blend of European style and American energy to the New York theater scene, quickly establishing herself at the Second Avenue Theatre. Her work in Yiddish films, while less known outside the Jewish community than is perhaps deserved, began in 1924 with the silent film Mazel Tov. In 1936, she appeared in what would come be considered an enduring classic, Yidd’l Mt’n Fidd’l, in which she played a girl who dresses as a boy to work with her father in a traveling group of street musicians. To many, her most memorable onscreen role was her appearance as Yenta, the irrepressible matchmaker, in the 1971 film version ofFiddler on the Roof (1964). She was also one of the few stars of the Yiddish theater to make a name for herself on Broadway, both through character parts and through her role in Milk and Honey in 1961. In 1992, Picon, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died at the age of ninety-three.
Significance
Picon’s career began in the days of vaudeville, when an international network of Jewish communities supported a vibrant and colorful theatrical world in productions that helped newly arrived immigrants learn about the ways of the United States and emphasized the continuities of Jewish life and identity. Her humor and style were a reminder of what it meant to be a Jew in a rapidly changing world. Despite economic depression, war, and the impact of radio and television, Picon carried the core values of the Yiddish theater into a new age for audiences who perhaps did not understand the language but responded warmly to her humor and her humanity.
Bibliography
Perl, Lila, and Donna Ruff. Molly Picon: A Gift of Laughter. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990. Simply written biography that covers all aspects of Picon’s life and career and how she made an impact on Jewish immigrants to the United States.
Picon, Molly. Molly! An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. A highly readable personal account of Picon’s career and the changing cultural worlds she belonged to over several decades.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. So Laugh a Little. New York: Messner, 1962. An affectionate account of Picon’s grandmother that gives a detailed picture of her home life and her career in the Yiddish theater from a different perspective.