Molly Picon

Molly Picon [Małka Opiekun] (1898-1992)

For over seventy years, Molly Picon, star of Yiddish theater and film, delighted audiences with her comic song and dance performances. While her career began in vaudeville and flourished in the Second Avenue theaters of New York's Lower East Side, Picon later performed on stage and in Yiddish and Hollywood films for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences around the world. Her engaging persona and powerful performances helped keep Yiddish culture alive by bringing it out of the shtetl and into mainstream American culture. Although Picon always played assertive characters on stage, for many years she struggled to be taken seriously as an independent woman and actress. Ultimately, however, she emerged as an icon for second generation American Jews and helped her audiences appreciate their immigrant past and forge new American Jewish identities. 

Molly Picon was born to Clara Ostrick and Louis Opiekun (Picon), in a tenement building on New York's lower east side. Before Molly was three, her restless father moved his young family to New Jersey and Chicago before finally settling down in Philadelphia. His sporadic work could not support the family, and it was Clara - or Mama Picon - that kept the family alive by working as a seamstress for the Yiddish Theater.
Molly grew up in a Philadelphia flat shared with her grandparents, mother, sister, and nine cousins. Her mother Clara supported the family by working as a seamstress at Kessler’s Theater. She recognized her daughter’s gift early in life and entered Molly in her first talent show at the age of five.
Molly Picon spent her youth onstage performing spunky song and dance routines in all-American amateur nights, local Nickelodeon Theater acts, trolley cars and the Columbia Yiddish Theater. Although she wanted to stay in school, she was exhausted from performing at night and then going to school each morning. At sixteen, Picon left William Penn High School to pursue a full time stage career. She was eventually cast as Winter in The Four Seasons, a traveling vaudeville production.
After six months on tour, The Four Seasons arrived in Boston to a city paralyzed by the influenza epidemic. The only theatre that remained open was the Boston Grand Opera House, which offered Yiddish Theater. Picon, looking for work, answered an advertisement for an ingenue placed by the director and producer Jacob "Yonkel" Kalich. He hired her on the spot and her “commitment to both Yonkel and the Yiddish Theater had begun.” Picon looked up to Kalich, a Polish immigrant who had quit rabbinical school to join a traveling acting troupe. He was seven years her senior, better educated and more experienced. The two fell in love and got married on June 29, 1919.

In 1920 Kalich took Picon to Europe to expose her to the European stage and enhance her reputation in America. She performed across the continent—in Vienna, Kishenev, Lemberg, Jassy, Bucharest, London and Paris - to rave reviews in original acts she and Kalich had written. She also made her film debut in European productions. Otto Freister filmed her first film, Das Judenmädel (The Jewish Girl), in Austria in 1921. The following year, she starred in another Yiddish production, Hütet eure Töchter (Watch for Your Daughters). While these films have not survived, Sidney Goldin and Jacob Kalich's 1923 Viennese production of Ost und West (East and West) has become the first surviving Yiddish film. This hilarious depiction of a feisty secularized American Jewish girl visiting her traditional relatives in Europe satirized the gulf that lay between American and European Jewry. The relationship that Picon formed with European audiences and her new understanding of Yiddish culture laid the foundation for the rest of her career. Those theatergoers and their American relatives, children and grandchildren would return again and again to see Picon perform. By the time she returned to the United States two years later, her fame had already preceded her.

In the early 1920’s Picon’s career took off. At 4’11", weighing less than 100 pounds, she created a unique presence on the Yiddish stage. Playing parts written for her by her husband, Picon was cast almost exclusively as young girls who either dressed or behaved like insouciant young boys. Audiences loved the transgressive behavior that became signature Molly Picon. Between 1921 and 1925, she created some of her most famous stage roles in plays such as Yonkele (Little Yonkel), Tzipke, Shmendrik (Loser), Gypsy Girl, Molly Dolly, Little Devil, Mamale (Mommy), Raizele, Oy is Dus A Madel (What a Girl), and The Circus Girl. Picon would return to many of these roles later in her career. Often exaggerating that she played Yonkele - the story of a little boy who desperately wants to make this world a better place - “more than three thousand times.” Picon identified strongly with many of the roles she played on stage.
In the early 1930s, Picon continued to reach new audiences at home and abroad. She and Kalich traveled extensively, performing throughout Europe (to “touch base with [their] Yiddish roots”), South America, and South Africa. In 1932, the couple visited the renowned author and poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, in Palestine. Between her international travels, Picon continued to delight audiences at home. In 1934, she began broadcasting her first radio show. 

In 1937, Picon and Kalich filmed Yiddle Mitn Fidl (Yiddle with his Fiddle) in Poland. Yiddle is the story of a young girl who dresses up as a boy so she and her father can earn a living as traveling musicians. Kalich's first Yiddish musical, the film not only explores the by now familiar themes of cross—dressing, but is a genuine attempt to document urban and rural Eastern European Jewish experience. Picon and Kalich returned to Poland in 1938 to film Mamale (Mommy). This musical comedy was the last Jewish film made in Poland before the Nazi onslaught. At forty, Picon plays a young girl of twelve whose mother dies and leaves her to take care of her large and unappreciative family; a role she had created on stage ten years earlier. The film took on special poignancy as she and Kalich struggled to capture the endangered shtetl culture on the eve of WWII. 

Despite the decline of Yiddish - speaking audiences, Picon’s career continued to flourish. In 1942, Kalich responded to the demographic change and wrote his new musical, Oy Is Dus a Leben! (What a Hard Life!), in both Yiddish and English. A biographical piece that chronicled Picon’s childhood and romance with Kalich, the play was a huge success and became the first Yiddish play ever to reach Broadway.

After the war, Picon continued to collaborate with Kalich to preserve the essence of Yiddish theater. In the 1940’s and 50’s they worked to create a genre of American - Yiddish art for an older generation which remembered Yiddish and was nostalgic for a disappearing culture and a younger generation trying to find a cultural heritage. Picon engaged audiences with crowd pleasers like 1949’s Abi Gezunt (You Should Only Be Well!) and 1950’s Sadie is a Lady in which she played characters reminiscent of those she played in her early years. 

As the Jewish-American presence in the entertainment industry expanded, Picon became seen as an "ethnic actress." Hoping to expand her reputation on the non - Yiddish stage, she performed in a successful London production of Majority of One. Upon her return to the United States she was cast as an Italian mother opposite Frank Sinatra in Neil Simon’s screen adaption of Come Blow Your Horn. Receiving an academy award nomination for her performance in her first Hollywood film, Picon then went on to star in her first Broadway hit: Milk and Honey. 

In 1971, Picon returned with Kalich to Europe to film Hollywood’s English version of the musical, Fiddler on the Roof. Kalich's health had already begun to decline and this was to be his last screen performance. Shortly after their return from Yugoslavia, Kalich fell gravely ill. A temporary recovery freed Picon to star in For Pete’s Sake with Barbara Striesand. Soon after the filming was over, however, Yonkel suffered a relapse and Picon flew home from California to attend to her beloved husband. She spent the next three years nursing her dying husband. Kalich died of cancer on March 16, 1975. 

Returning to work after Kalich's death was especially difficult for Picon because so much of her career as well as her personal life was intricately tied to her husband. Picon created and toured with her one-woman show, Hello Molly. The show traced her long and loving relationship with the Yiddish Theater and gave her an opportunity to remain connected to her beloved audiences.

She died on April 6, 1992 from Alzheimer’s disease at 94 years of age.

с сокращениями Jewish Women's Archive

[78RPM]

Abi Gesind (Molly Picon - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon RCA Victor 25-5022 1939

Busy, Busy (Molly Picon - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon Banner B-2016A

Farges Mikh Nit (Jacob Jacobs - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon RCA Victor 25-5021-A 1939

Hot Dogs (Isidore Lillian - Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8121-F 1926

Ikh Ken Fergessen Yeden Nor Nit In Dir (Molly Picon - Joseph Rumshinsky) Lucy Levin Pathe 3738-A 1926

Ikh Ken Fergessen Yeden Nor Nit In Dir (Molly Picon - Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8113-F 1926

Katinka (Molly Picon - Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8113-F 1926

Liebe Fun Farshidener Felker (Molly Picon - Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8100-F 1925

Makht Dos Khosidl Bim-Bom Molly Picon Columbia 8118-F 1926

Oy S'iz Git (Jacob Jacobs - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon RCA Victor 25-5028 1939

Tzimbelt, Weiber (Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8100-F 1925

Vi Azoy Trinkt A Keyser Tey Molly Picon Columbia 8118-F 1926

Vi Iz Mayn Zivug (Isidore Lillian - Joseph Rumshinsky) Molly Picon Columbia 8121-F 1926

Yiddish (Jacob Kalich - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon RCA Victor 25-5022 1939

Yidl Mit'n Fidl (Izik Manger - Abe Ellstein) Molly Picon RCA Victor 25-5028 1939

[33RPM]

Ikh Sing (Molly Picon - Abe Ellstein) Leo Fuld Hataklit HI-25005

If You Have Your Health	abi gezunt
*Molly Picon - Abe Ellstein*
A little sun, then rain may follow A quiet place where things are mellow If you have your health, then thank your lucky stars! A shoe, a sock, clothes with no patches A little change to buy what's lacking If you have your health, then than your lucky stars The air is free for rich and poor The sun shines bright for all the people Just open your door A little joy, a little laughter A drink with friends, more fun thereafter If you have your health, then thank your lucky stars! Some folks seek their fortune, Others look for stardom And some just want the whole shebang And some folks thing all the counts is what's in the bank Let them all keep searching Let them all keep chasing But as far as I'm concerned I can live without it 'Cause lady luck's at my door	a bisl zun a bisl regn a ruig ort dem kop tzu legn abi gezunt ken men gliklakh zayn a shukh a zok a kleyd on lates in keshene a drei fir zlotes abi gezunt ken men gliklakh zayn di luft is frey far yeden gleikh di zun zi shaynt far yedn einem orim oder raykh a bisl frayd a bisl lakhn a mol mit frant a shnepsl makhn abi gezunt ken men gliklakh zayn einer zukht ashires einer zukht gevires aynemen di gantze velt einer meint dos gantze glik heingt nor up in gelt zoln ale zikhen zoln ale krikhen nor ikh trakht bayn mir ikh darf dos oyf kapures vayl do glikshtayt be mayn tir.

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Last update 14-09-2011