Caray, Caray!

Excerpts from
Molly Picon (1898-1992)
With her geneyvishe oygn [mischievous eyes], dark bob, and endearing acrobatics, she won hearts ...

For much of her career, her forte was the adorable waif, often a motherless boy, who, with naive gumption, a charming display of tears, laughter, somersaults, splits, songs, cartwheels, and musical instruments, accompanied by an occasional farm animal and good luck, managed to make it in the adult world.

She seemed simultaneously all-American in her winsome tomboy persona, the irresistible scamp.

In Mamele (1938), a comic melodrama from a play by Meyer Schwartz, Picon, over forty, played Khavtski, an energetic twelve-year-old gamin who cares for her widowed father and six siblings. This was the last Jewish film made in Poland before the Nazi onslaught.