By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist
The words “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” automatically brings a certain tune and song to the minds of almost all readers. Whether or not you were alive when this Allan Sherman song became a hit, most Americans know it or have heard it parodied — though it was already a parody of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Part of Sherman’s brilliance was pairing his decidedly mediocre voice with beautiful orchestral arrangements and backup singing.
Mark Cohen’s Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman (Brandeis, cloth, $29.95) brings the life of expert song parodist and comedian Allan Sherman vividly to life, and in great detail. Sherman was a poster boy for the truism that the foundation of successful comedy is tragedy. A neglected child, he was passed from relative to relative. It was during the short, but relatively stable time in the care of his grandparents that he learned about Jewish culture, but it was enough to be able to accurately skewer Jewish Americans of that time.
Sherman carried his childhood angst into adulthood of excesses of food, work and booze. Fully integrated into the ’60s popular culture, his story reads like an episode of television’s “Mad Men.” Even when his income couldn’t justify it, whether he was writing Broadway shows in New York or television shows in Los Angeles, he insisted on living larger than life, albeit for too short a time.
Whether readers are interested only in Sherman, or in the history of that era, this book is interesting on many levels. This Sherman fan’s only complaint is that two of his later and most brilliant songs are given short shrift, probably because they never achieved the popularity of “Letter from Camp” referenced above. Those would be “You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louis” (“We’re gonna take you and the queen/down to the guillotine/and shorten you a little bit”) and “Good Advice” (“good advice costs nothing and it’s worth the price”).
Set in 1960s Kansas City, the fictional coming-of-age story, Saving Dr. Block (independent, paper, $14.95), dovetails nicely with Sherman’s biography, illustrating the racism and anti-Semitism common to that time through the eyes of 12-year-old Howard Block. In addition to preparing for his Bar Mitzvah (which includes memorizing a speech the rabbi has written for him!), Howard has decided to help save his father from a fraudulent medical malpractice suit.
Modeling themselves after their newest pop culture hero James Bond, Howard and his two best friends save the day and, yes, get the girl, with some entertaining and touching results.
While there are clearly fictional elements, the reader will assume that some of the author’s vivid scenes are drawn from his own childhood. A physician who served as literary editor of the Harvard Lampoon as an undergrad, L.M. Vincent has published fiction, non-fiction and plays, and divides his time between Boston and Seattle.
Turning to Germany, Yascha Mounk, now a Ph.D. candidate in political thought at Harvard, tells us how even a 30-something growing up Jewish in Germany couldn’t escape that country’s long and complicated history and relationship with Jews. In Stranger in My Own Country (FSG, cloth, $26), Mounk recounts his family’s fascinating story in that country, putting it together with history and politics so it becomes much more than a memoir.
“I never thought to question why my family might be so small,” says Mounk of his childhood. His grandparents, Polish Holocaust survivors, turned to the Communist movement as young adults, as did many of their peers. While it saved them from Hitler — Mounk’s grandfather worked in a munitions factory in Siberia during the war — postwar Polish anti-Semitism drove them from their home country and circumstances found them in Germany.
“Since having Jewish ancestors marked me out as alien, or even inferior, I was all the more determined to call myself a Jew,” he writes. Perhaps one key to honing Jewish identity is a good dose of alienation.
On a similar note, the poetically written novel My Mother’s Secret (Putnam, cloth, $19.95), by J.L. Witterick, is a fictionalized account on the story of righteous gentiles Franciszka Halamajowa — the mother of the title — and her daughter Helena. Residents of Sokal, a small Polish town, the Halamajowas managed to safely hide two Jewish families and a pacifist German soldier in their tiny house. With a focus on all the mothers involved, the author tells the story in a brief but touching fashion.