Hartford’s own “Red Hot Mama” stayed true to her Jewish roots

By Cindy Mindell

RED HOT MAMA

Next year marks the 50th yahrzeit of one of America’s biggest-ever stars, a Jewish immigrant who grew up in Hartford and rose to fame from her family’s kosher restaurant on Front Street.

Sonya Kalish was born in a cart in 1887 as her parents and two older brothers were en route from Tsarist Russia to a new life in America. Somewhere along the way, through Hungary and Italy and on board a ship to Ellis Island, Charles Kalish changed the family surname to Abuza. After spending a few years with relatives in Boston, the Abuzas settled in Hartford, where Sonya Kalish Abuza would begin her rags-to-riches rise to superstardom as Sophie Tucker.

Now, Sue and Lloyd Ecker have set out to bring Sophie back. The couple first encountered “the last of the red-hot mamas” in 1973, when Bette Midler portrayed Tucker in a show at Ithaca College, where the two were undergraduates. After graduation, they married, raised three kids, and ran a successful family business. In 2006, the Eckers sold their company and had too much time on their hands.

Recalling Midler’s show, the two decided that they would become the world’s foremost authority on Tucker and then develop a new entertainment franchise based on her life story. Over the next eight years, they researched 14 archives, travelled to more than 20 U.S. states, as well as Canada, England, and France. They pored over some 400 of Tucker’s personal scrapbooks, housed at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and at Brandeis University.

Along with a three-book fictional memoir and upcoming feature film and Broadway musical, the Eckers have produced a documentary film, The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, which will open the Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival on Thursday, March 12 (follow story for details).

Susan Ecker spoke with the Ledger about the local girl who took America and Europe by storm.

Q: Sophie Tucker inhabits a special place in local Jewish history. What was her Hartford life like?

A: Sophie’s parents, Charles and Jennie, opened Abuza’s Home Restaurant, a kosher restaurant on Front Street, where the whole family worked – Sophie, her two older brothers, and younger sister. Sophie was the singer, the bubbly one. Her job was to wait tables and interact with the customers, who got to know her. She was always very interested in the most popular songs of the time. She was friends with John Sudarsky, who became the editor of the Hartford Daily Courant [later, the Courant]. He had a player piano and she would learn the latest songs with him and then come back to the restaurant to sing them while waiting on tables. Customers would request songs and throw her a quarter or a nickel as a tip. Eventually, she won $5 in a talent show in Riverside Park in Hartford.

Her father had a great idea to drum up business: he would go to Poli’s Theater, the vaudeville venue in Hartford, and hand out flyers to all the actors leaving the stage door after the show. That’s where Sophie became acquainted with vaudeville. She snuck in backstage, climbed up on the balcony, and fell in love with theater.

At 16, Sophie married Louis Tuck and soon after gave birth to their son, Bert. When she decided to follow her theatrical dreams, she realized that she would have to leave home: you couldn’t just start at Poli; it was the best theater chain on the vaudeville circuit and you had to be a headliner to perform there. When she was 18 or 19, Sophie left Bert with her younger sister, Anna, and went to New York City with just $90 in her pocket. After making it at the Palace Theater, she would eventually headline at the Poli.

She came back to Hartford a year after leaving and was shunned by the community because she had left her family. But her own family supported her, even though her mother, Jennie, never believed that Sophie would make it. Sophie would send money home every week to help her family and her mother never spent it, thinking that Sophie would need the money once she got theater out of her system.

Sophie was very close with her family. Her older brother was her manager and when he passed away, her other brother became her manager, and when he passed away her nephew became her manager. She exchanged tons of letters with her sister, Annie, and traveled to Europe with Annie or with her niece.

Q: After leaving Hartford, did she maintain a Jewish life?

A: She did. She would always say kaddish for her parents, wherever she was performing. She tells a story about running into a synagogue for maariv, while she was on the road, and the place was dark and seemed closed. She sees a man who is cleaning and asks, “Am I too late?” and he says, “No, lady, the mikveh is still open.”

She kept Jewish tradition according to her rules: she would be kosher whenever possible but if it wasn’t convenient – like when she was down south and a fraternity of guys invited her to their picnic, and she ate the pork and beans. She was not ashamed of being Jewish but also didn’t want to offend her hosts.

Another story: Sophie was supposed to work on Yom Kippur and didn’t want to and told the manager, “This is my holiest day and I won’t be working” and he threatened to dock her pay or fire her. So, she took out a piece of paper and wrote, “My manager is forcing me to work on my holiest day” and asked the manager to sign it and told him that she was going to bring it to the newspaper. The manager backed down and Sophie didn’t work on Yom Kippur.

Sophie’s mother, Jennie, was very involved with the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Hartford and Sophie always made donations to the home. That ethic of giving charity stayed with her forever.

Q: How was she regarded by Jews at the time?

A: Her hit song, My Yiddishe Momme [which Sophie began performing in 1925, after her mother’s death], was the Jewish anthem in this country and abroad because she dared to be a Jewish woman singing Yiddish in the face of the rising Nazi regime. One side was recorded in English and the other side in Yiddish. If you were Jewish, My Yiddishe Momme was in your home, wherever you lived in the world. She sold millions of those records in Europe and was a symbol of the strong Jewish personality at a time when Jews were hated and persecuted and she didn’t back down.

She was performing in England and did a show on Rosh Hashanah and the local Jewish community was outraged. The next time she came to England and the audience wanted her to sing My Yiddishe Momme, she refused, because they had criticized her on her earlier visit. It was her career and on her terms. That’s the essence of who she was – a proud Jew and also her own person. She was a conundrum, but at the end of the day, there was this sense of generosity of spirit and Jewish pride that she helped foster in others, in an era when to be a Jew was difficult.

My Yiddishe Momme was part of Kristallnacht: the Nazis looked for the record as they attacked Jewish homes and we can assume what happened when they found it.

Q: What was it about Sophie that turned you and Lloyd from researchers into fans?

A: There were so many wonderful stories that didn’t make it into the newspaper but that we learned from her letters. We also see in those letters so much of what was going on in America during those years. She would write to her fans – postcards and longer letters, and often in pencil – and in the scrapbooks, we saw letters that these people would write back to her, and they are not short letters.

For example, “My mother wanted to thank you for sending those two coats. She was able to keep my brothers warm during the winter.”

Or, “Thank you for sending money so we could get heat this winter.”

“I just lost my job and my daughter is devastated that she won’t get a Christmas gift this year.” And later, “Forgive me for not sending this thank-you sooner: I did not know that the doll my daughter received from the doll company had been sent by you.”

Sophie was also generous of spirit. As we learned when we interviewed people like Brenda Lee – who, at 16, was going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, following Sophie, who was always on. Brenda Lee was devastated and crying and told us that Sophie spent an hour with her and said, “Brendaleh, it’s going to be OK.”

Sophie was a huge star but she also gave of herself. She was this kind, generous person. She was also her own, very confident and strong person.

The Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival presents the Connecticut premiere of “The Outrageous Sophie Tucker,” Thursday, March 12 at Infinity Music Hall & Bistro in Hartford. Dinner reception and live cabaret at 5:30 p.m.; film at 7:30 p.m., followed by Reel Talk with Susan and Lloyd Ecker.

“Talking Tucker!,” breakfast talk with the Eckers hosted by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, on Friday, March 13, 10 a.m., at the Mandell JCC. For more information call (860) 727-6170 or email bbrodie@jewishhartford.org.

An encore screening of the film will be held on Sunday, March 22, noon at the Mandell JCC in West Hartford. 

For a full Festival schedule visit www.hjff.org. For tickets call (860) 231-6316 or email tickets@mandelljcc.org.

CAP: Susan and Lloyd Ecker