In the photograph my white-haired mother, seventy-seven years old, handsome, and still plump, by then a widow for four years, sits in a chair in a corner of my living room on Riverside Drive. A modernistic lamp with a translucent plastic shade lights her from above; houseplants crowd the darkness around her. She looks up and out, leaning her head on her hand, but her focus is inward: she is pensive, subdued, maybe a little melancholy but alert. The plants are gone now and the lampshade as well, but the comfortable chair—reupholstered—is still there in that corner of my living room. Six years older now than she was then, I sit in it often, these days, reading or just musing, like my mother. Often about my mother. For what this photograph suggests seems to me now to be true: if you have the privilege of watching your life wind up—or is it down—you tend to think about the shape of it, what it might have meant—or, as my mother would have put it, what it amounted to.

One of the stories she liked to repeat to her children and grand-children was about walking around a street corner, one after-noon, just in time to hear one neighbor remark to another, “With due respect for Mrs. Mayer,” evidently preparing to say something not very nice about her. That would have been during her busy years as a mother in Astoria, Queens, where we lived in a three- room ground-floor apartment when I was a child. I never quite got the point of that story, only the plea-sure she took in the formal phrase and the honorific, which delighted her almost as much as having accidentally stoppered the gossip’s mouth.

To this day I can picture the brisk and popular “Mrs. Mayer” of my childhood, corseted and upswept and red- lipsticked, a respectable or, as she preferred, in Yiddish, a balbatish woman: that is who she was in the 1940s and ’50s, decades before she turned into my children’s benign, philosophical, amusing Grandma Rose. Another anecdote she liked to tell on herself (and me) in her old age, delivered with a sly glint, was about overhearing a new friend of mine saying, “Rachel, I didn’t know you had such a Jewish mother.” Self- aware often to the point of self-caricature, she was consciously a variation on a type she might have invented if Gertrude Berg had not played Molly Goldberg on television.

But Gertrude Berg did play Molly Goldberg on television, back then—conceived, wrote, and performed the comic role of the matriarch of a rising American Jewish family— and in my early teens we watched The Goldbergs together as a fam-ily, in the knotty- pine-finished basement of our row house inKew Gardens Hills, a bit farther out in Queens. “Yoo- hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!” her neighbor sang out to begin the show (and my mother sang along with her), and Molly threw up her window to talk across the alley where the wash hung and we— my brother and I and our parents—laughed at the Jewish way Molly talked, as we had laughed at the actress Minerva Pious playing Mrs. Nussbaum on Fred Allen’s radio show, Allen’s Alley, which we had listened to earlier in our small apartment in Astoria.

I grew up in the Golden Age of American Jewish comedy broadcasts. Nourished by the success of the Marx Brothers in the movies, buoyed by the vaudeville of the Borscht Belt in the Catskills, it ran from Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, and George Burns (a distant cousin of my mother’s) through Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks, who did Jewish shtick— literally “piece”—for laughs. Known to be Jewish by Jews, recognizable as such by non- Jews, these performers made it funny instead of tragic to be a Yiddish-speaking immigrant from Europe, where the Jews had nearly been exterminated.

Mocking the foreign accents of many of her relatives and neighbors, my mother fairly convinced us she had no accent herself. Our father had a slight accent, she conceded, explain-ing that he was “a naturalized citizen.” (Implicitly, in contrast, Citizen Rose was Nature itself.) She herself had maybe an in-flection in English, an intonation. A lilt. In her later years, as her Yiddishisms increased, she kept her critical little distance from her immigrant peers. The stereotype of the Yiddishe Mama threatened to swallow her, but she eluded by recognizing, dancing with it. She performed authenticity— as well as expertise. And in truth she had none of the creepy secrecy and evasiveness of so many assimilating social-climbing American Jews we knew— and little of the hopeful heartiness of the left-wingers, and only a touch of the sentimentality of truly pious Jews. Unapologetic about who she was and where she came from, she was a righteous but not self- righteous woman— and funny. By the time Dan Greenburg’s How to Be a Jewish Motherwas published in 1964, she could have written it herself.

My parents’ favorite actor was a local hero who made it in Hollywood, the not- too- Jewish Brooklyn boy Danny Kaye, who sang and danced and even fenced, and did all kinds of languages and accents, in the movies. We had an album of his seventy-eights, which we listened to together and memorized. He was so smart and blond and handsome that my parents doted on him as if he were another son— not that any son of theirs would be a professional comedian. Our parents had academic aspirations for us. My smart and blond and handsome brother and I were good students, and in time we both duly became college professors. But in a way we were, deep down, a family of comedians.
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One of my mother’s favorite Polish proverbs, in something of the same vein, goes “Jak się nie pocieszysz, to się powie-sisz,” which she translated as “If you don’t make a joke of it, you’ll go hang yourself.” She was quoting her grandmother, who quoted a philosophical Polish woodcutter she had befriended. It was, as it were, my mother’s philosophy of life, and— although my children correctly inform me that I didn’t recognize her as a philosopher until they grew up and did so—I unthinkingly inherited it.