This is an introduction to the third eulogy of my mother. The introduction includes the movie Orphans of the Storm by D. W. Griffith, the brilliant, flamboyant, dashing director about whom Gore Vidal wrote in his novel Hollywood. Hollywood is about how Griffith and the movie industry collaborated with President Wilson during World War I to produce expensive anti-war propaganda.

As you can see, I sometimes veer from the track.

Track 1 is the third eulogy for my mother Dr. Miriam Pell Schmerler. This eulogy concerns the time from 1930, when my grandmother returned with my mother (Mother was just 5) to the Jewish family, to 1947 when Mother graduated from Hunter College pregnant with me.

The second track is how to prepare you for what is to come. Two movies are required viewing. The first is Orphans of the Storm and second is Marjorie Morningstar. They form what may regarded as book ends (of a sort). Orphans of the Storm, D.W Griffith’s final film released in 1921 but the site of a traumatic experience when first viewed by my mother in 1930. Stay tuned for the trauma.

The second movie is Marjorie Morningstar with Natalie Wood in the title role of a woman who graduates from Hunter College at about the same time that Mother attended Hunter. Mother used to say, “I went to Hunter College with Marjorie Morningstar.”

Why these movies were significant in defining the period and the secrecy that was forced on Mother—the need for secrecy being so characteristic that it seemed so often like part of her makeup—her DNA….

Orphans of the Storm can be viewed right here on this blog, Providence working.

Or Download from neat website The Digital Internet Library where you can download for free digital movies, such as Orphans of the Storm and have access to lots of fascinating stuff (be specific, when you write; be specific)

http://www.archive.org/

Here is your movie ready for download:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=orphans%20of%20the%20storm

A word of caution. The movie downloaded to me as two files each over 2 hours long. Five hours is a lot of time to spend with a silent movie unless you are the professor in silent films whom I have been meaning to call.

I release you of the obligation to view the second file. Believe me the first file will be enough. The silent movie works better with music—music with no words, a lot of volins and very corny. It also works best if you do not feel obliged to watch it in large doses. I simply want to give you the flavor of the movie. I have been stopping it every ten minutes and it looks better every time I have had a cup of coffee and return.

The issue that is driving me to write these eulogies stems in part from Maurice Lamm’s graphic and instructive The Jewish Way of Death and Mourning. (How I feel about these practices is a subject for another time.) Lamm’s extensive discussion of the eulogy begins, “The eulogy is a significant focus. The funeral service. One of the most important obligations of mourners and heirs is to provide for this eulogy….Following the lesson of Abraham, the prose of the eulogy is twofold. First is hesped—the praising of the deceased for his worthy qualities. Second, is bechi expressing the grief and sense of loss experienced by the mourners and the entire Jewish community.”

With eulogies, I have just begun. I am on a quest. I want to find out who my mother was, how she was able to overcome tremendous obstacles, what she achieved. I do not want to keep eulogy writing up indefinitely, but I want to get out what I want to say about the meaning of my mother’s life.