By Mandy Patinkin
Shofar Magazine October 1998
(also in The Jewish American Family Album)

My story as an American Jew begins with my Grandpa Max, who was born to poor parents in a shtetl in Poland in about 1888. His father was a "Yeshiva bocher," a learned man in Jewish Scriptures, who made a meager living as a teacher. Max's mother ran a small candy and vegetable shop to supplement the family income. At age 11 Max quit school and became an apprentice in a leather shop. But in 1905, when the czar's army came to the village to impress the young men for military service in Siberia during the Russo-Japanese war, Max put a pack on his back and crossed the German border to book passage to America.

Like many others who arrived at Ellis Island, Max was met by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped him find lodging and a job in New York City. He later joined relatives in Chicago, where he worked packing cigar boxes and as an usher at the Palace Theater.

Max earned enough at the cigar factory to help bring another brother to Chicago, but a guarantee of a job was then necessary to come to America. Max asked his boss to supply the job, but the boss angrily turned him down. That might Max Patinkin decided to go into business for himself. He invested his savings in a horse and wagon and became a junk peddler. Grandpa Max became the family patriarch and devoted himself to philanthropic causes, notably on the board of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society -- coming full circle.

The business prospered and expanded, and by the time I entered the picture People's Iron and Metal Company was an important part of the recycling business and employed many relatives, including my father. I was named after my Grandpa Max, whose Hebrew/Yiddish name was Menachem Mendel.

My mother's grandparents came from the town of Skud, Latvia, and were assigned the name Scudder when they arrived on Ellis Island. My great-grandfather was a learned man, a rabbi, chazzan (cantor), mohel (who performs ritual circumcision), and schochet (ritual slaughterer). They ended up in Davenport, Iowa -- which needed one person to provide all those services for the Jewish community. Later, Morris worked at Swift & Co. in Chicago, supervising its kosher butchering operation.

When I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, our whole world revolved around the synagogue. My parents were members of the Men's Club and the Sisterhood. I went to Hebrew school five days a week, as well as on Sunday; on Saturday I was in the boys' choir. And I went to a Hebrew-speaking camp for two years. I was a rebel and wouldn't study, but I made a deal: I got myself cast as Tevye in the all-Hebrew camp production of Fiddler on the Roof -- and that was my Hebrew work for the summer.

Today I have two boys of my own and a wonderful wife, and my Jewishness informs my entire life. I do the rituals and the holidays, and I love my Jewishness. I love the tradition. The religious part of it is something very personal to me. It's something I define and have made up for myself. But the traditional aspects of belonging to a history of people are what I love the most -- the comfort that I feel through the ancestral links of centuries, especially that of my own father, my grandfather, and what their lives were about.

Early in my career, people would say to me, "You're a Jewish actor." I took offense because I wanted to play everything. And indeed, the theater never typecast me as a Jew. I was Che Guevara, I was Georges Seurat. I was anybody. I was never Jewish. And yet, it took me quite a while, and maybe the birth of my own sons, and maybe my marriage, and maybe experiencing anti-Semitism that I denied as a boy, to make me finally realize that everybody I play is Jewish. It is how I look at the world.

When I was a boy I went to temple every Shabbos, and every Friday night. There I got the message that we're generous people, that we're benevolent people, that we're care taking people, that we're good people. There's a word in Hebrew, tzedakah, which means to give charity. And the phrase Tikkun olom, to repair the world. I love those words, and I rejoice when my children put them into action by doing things like giving their money or their time to charitable causes they've chosen.

Our children are going to have a very different experience than either of us had. For my wife, who grew up in Los Angeles, her Jewishness, her Jewish understanding, was social activism. My Jewish understanding was the synagogue. We have tried to bring up our children as Jews by reaching them at home, through experiences of traditional religious holidays.

We have made our own Haggadah for Passover. We make our own prayers that are a combination of our prayer book, of Jewish prayers that we know, of Shakespeare, of e. e cummings, of all kinds of people -- anything I hear that I believe in, that echoes the ideas that I felt that Grandpa Max embodied. The generosity, the care taking, contributing beyond just our own community.

I love Yiddish songs because they tell stories -- and they're almost all stories about the journey of Jewish families. In 1993 President Clinton asked me to sing for the dedication of the Holocaust Museum at the White House. The audience included not only the presidents of countries all over the world but Holocaust survivors. The last song I sang was in Yiddish, and it was "Yossel, Yossel." And an old man came up to me, and he said, "Young man, I was liberated from Auschwitz, and if 40 years ago someone had come up to me and said, '40 years from today, you will be standing at the White House and an American Jewish boy will be singing "Yossel, Yossel,"' I never would have believed it." It was a great moment.

Another of my favorite Hebrew words is rachmones, which means compassion. That's what we try to teach our children -- compassion for each other, for our family, and for the world.

A Patinkin Family Reunion

(Look for Mandy and son in lower right and Mandy's wife Kathryn Grody standing behind them)

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