A Letter to Mother
The
film A Letter to Mother illustrates
the realistic story of a Jewish family in 1939. The mother struggled to take
care of her family, as her husband could not maintain employment. The family
had to face unfortunate event after unfortunate event. The first of which was
the father’s decision to leave behind the family and move to America. He had
good intentions of becoming successful and bring his family to live with him,
but his plan did not go accordingly and caused much heartache with the family
being torn apart. The oldest on went to war and died, but had a friend send a
letter to his mother for him. The daughter got married and the youngest son was
abandoned in America after his father died. The mother, who was horribly sad by
being torn apart from all of her family, went to America to find her son and
escape the harsh war conditions. This family illustrated many Jewish
traditions. For one, I noticed that the men wore hats almost all of the time.
This is common of Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish traditions. Another thing that I
noticed was that Jews tended to only associate with each other, especially for
business purposes. This is something that is described in Jews, Christian, and Muslims. The book also says that Jews were
often not allowed to have many types jobs when the empire was under Christian
rule. This is consistent with the movie, where not all could find employment and
many of them had similar jobs. They also had much more hope of living a
prosperous life in the United States, partly because Jews were not so
criticized there as they were in Europe. There were many other interesting
tidbits I noticed about the Jewish community in this era from the movie, but I
lost my notes and do not remember all of them. Letter to Mother was a very interesting and educational movie. I
enjoyed it very much and would recommend it to others. I think that this film
should continue to be used to in religion classes in the future, as it is both
intellectually stimulating and interesting.
