Where Is My Child? (1937)

Celia Adler, doyenne of the Yiddish stage, gives a haunting performance as the film's heroine who arrives in New York in 1911 at the height of mass Jewish immigration newly widowed, friendless, impoverished and the mother of a newborn baby boy. Fearing that she cannot care for the child, she places him in an orphanage. She quickly regrets her decision, but it is too late as she finds herself tricked into the decision. Obsessed with the thought of reunion with him, she spends the next twenty-five years searching, pining, and bewailing her loss. The film is filled with the conventions of the popular Yiddish stage: the melodramatic plot centering on the rupture and restoration of family ties; the comic subplot; the songs; the stereotyped characters; the happy coincidences and happier endings. Above all, it was the theme of the pains and joys of the mother-son relationship, always idealized in the Jewish folk mind, which could be counted on to strike a responsive chord. All this was bound to be familiar to the film's first audiences.