In my post yesterday I wrote that Allan Sherman’s first Jewish song parody invoked Humpty Dumpty partly because his parents, Rose and Percy Copelon, filed for divorce in June 1932, when Sherman was seven.
That’s enough to make any kid feel that no one could put his pieces together again.
But how to explain Humpty Dumpty happily singing in Yiddish?
Well, by the time Sherman penned that ditty in 1938, he had spent a lot of time living with his Yiddish-speaking, immigrant maternal grandparents in Chicago. (His mama was busy looking for a new husband.) In his autobiography, Sherman even wrote vividly about his grandfather taking him to Chicago’s Division Street baths, which figure prominently in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. (The shvitz also makes an important appearance in Bellow’s Seize the Day and in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. And let’s not forget about Bruce Jay Friedman’s play, Steambath. The baths were an impressive Jewish environment for young American Jews.)
Now, Sherman’s mother was also a Yiddish-speaking immigrant. Rose arrived in America when she was four. But she wasn’t about to admit it. On all her marriage licenses she claimed she was born in the U.S. And though she always married Jewish men, the last time she got married she had a Christian minister perform the rites.
So Sherman kept moving back and forth between his unambiguously Jewish grandparents and his Jewish heritage-denying mother and her third and fourth husbands and intervening boyfriends.
After years of this life, Sherman at 13 seems to have decided that he may not have a permanent home address. He may not have a permanent father. He may not have a permanent last name (he went back and forth between Copelon and Sherman even in college). And he may not have a mother who knew who she was or wanted to be.
But he had Jewish grandparents who spoke Yiddish. They were exactly what they seemed to be. And that’s what he was going to be.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a train/Happily singing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.’”
Comments