Nadene Goldfoot
Samuel Goldwyn (/ˈɡoʊldwɪn/ GOHLD-win; born Szmuel Gelbfisz; Yiddish: שמואל געלבפֿיש; July 1879 – January 31, 1974) was a Polish-born American film producer and pioneer in the American film industry, who produced Hollywood's first major motion picture. My father was born in 1908, so was 11 years old, a bit younger. He probably went to see movies made by Goldwyn.
Goldwyn was likely born in July 1879, although he claimed his birthday to be August 27, 1882. At the time, most Jews fabricated their ages to prevent future conscription for the Russian Empire, meaning that the Polish army would have drafted him and being Jewish, would wind up on the front lines for fodder.
He was born as Szmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw to Hasidic Jewish parents (religious), a "MAN OF THE BOOK" spending his time studying the Talmud." They were Aaron Dawid Gelbfisz, a peddler, and Hanna Frymet nee Fiszhaut. His native language spoken from birth in his home was Yiddish. Hespoke Polish.
"He had changed his name 2 times from Shmuel Gelbfisch after running away from his family in the Warsaw ghetto and immigrating alone to America in 1896 at age 14. Gelbfisch left without a passport, documents, or any desire to follow in his father's footsteps.
Leaving Warsaw penniless after his father's death, he made his way to Hamburg. There he stayed with acquaintances of his family where he trained as a glove maker.
Before walking to the German border to find steerage room in the port of Bremen, he stole some rubles from his mother's cash box and had taken one of his father's suits, which a tailor friend altered to his size. He had committed the sin of a gonif (thief) out of desperation at the age of 14.
On November 26, 1898 at age 16,, Gelbfisz left Hamburg for Birmingham, England, where he remained with relatives for six weeks under the name Samuel Goldfish. On January 4, 1899 at 17, he sailed from Liverpool, arrived in Philadelphia on January 19,1899 and went to New York. He found work upstate in Gloversville, New York in the bustling glove business. Soon, his marketing skills made him a very successful salesman at the Elite Glove Company. After 4 years as vice-president of sales when age 21, he moved to New York City and settled at 10 West 61st Street.
In 1913, Goldwyn, along with his brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, and Arthur Friend formed a partnership, The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, to produce feature-length motion pictures. With a merger, Zukor became president of Paramount and Famous Players–Lasky, Goldwyn was named chairman of the board of Famous Players–Lasky, and Jesse Lasky was the first vice-president.
Desiring a change of scene, DeMille, Lasky, Sam Goldfish (later Samuel Goldwyn), and a group of East Coast businessmen created the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1913, of which DeMille became director-general. Lasky and DeMille were said to have sketched out the organization of the company on the back of a restaurant menu. As director-general, DeMille's job was to make the films.
DeMille's mother Beatrice, a literary agent and scriptwriter, was the daughter of German Jews. She had emigrated from England with her parents in 1871 when she was 18; the newly arrived family settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they maintained a middle-class, English-speaking household. DeMille's parents met as members of a music and literary society in New York. Henry, his father, was a tall, red-headed student. Beatrice was intelligent, educated, forthright, and strong-willed. They married on July 1, 1876, despite Beatrice's parents' objections because of the young couple's differing religions; Beatrice converted to Episcopalianism.
Then, it was Demille who made "THE TEN COMMANDMENTS." The 1956 film "The Ten Commandments" was directed and produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He also directed the 1923 silent film version of the story. The 1956 film is a remake of his earlier work.
Cecil B. DeMille directed two versions of The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956) and Samson and Delilah (1949), all of which are considered religious epics with biblical themes. While The King of Kings (1927) depicts the life of Jesus Christ, it is also a biblical epic. Therefore, he made three films that can be classified as dealing with Jewish themes or biblical stories
He was a Canadian-American film producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM) in 1924. Under Mayer's management, MGM became the film industry's most prestigious movie studio, accumulating the largest concentration of leading writers, directors, and stars in Hollywood.
Samuel Goldwyn learned that early filmgoers laughed whenever his adopted American name, Samuel Goldfish/ came on the screen, so Samuel Goldwyn was born. Goldwyn denied he was feuding with his longtime enemy, fellow Eastern European Jewish immigrant, Louis B. Mayer. WHAT ? WE'RE LIKE FRIENDS; WE'RE LIKE BROTHERS; WE LOVE EACH OTHER. WE'D DO ANYTHING FOR EACH OTHER. WE'D EVEN CUT EACH OTHER'S THROATS FOR EACH OTHER! I TOOK THE WHOLE THING WITH A DOSE OF SALTS, echoes his words with that Yiddish irony in his tone.
My father's story is so similar, but he was born in Portland being the next generation with a father from Lithuania. My father was born as Moses Goldfus, and changed it, presumably in England as Morris Goldfoot. My mother continued to change it to Maurice Goldfoot. My father's native language was also Yiddish, and had to learn English in 1st grade.
Goldwyn became known as a nasty person, ungrateful and mean. Was it that he was using Yiddish construction to speak English, like saying, INCLUDE ME OUT, which was so like Groucho Marx's declarations, or WHATEVER IT IS, I'M AGAINST IT ! A VERBAL CONTRACT ISN'T WORTH THE PAPER IT'S WRITTEN ON !
He took a trip to Hawaii and called out to his employees, BON VOYAGE! BON VOYAGE TO YOU ALL ! When he returned, he fired many of those who'd come to wave good-bye. He was a pretty hard man to read. Once his observation was this: EVERY TOM, DICK, AND HARRY IS NAMED JOHN?
- Danny Kaye films: Goldwyn was instrumental in launching the career of actor and comedian Danny Kaye, who, although not explicitly Jewish in most of his films, often embodied a type of lighthearted, humorous persona that resonated with broader audiences, including Jewish ones.
- Resistance to censorship: Goldwyn notably resisted attempts to remove "Jewish names" from film credits during a period of rising anti-Semitism in the 1940s, and also refused to blacklist writers accused of being communists after the war, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. This suggests a personal commitment to principle and perhaps a subtle form of resistance to prevailing prejudice, even if not directly reflected in explicitly Jewish storylines in his films.
- Modern-day Goldwyn Films: It is worth noting that the company that bears his name, Samuel Goldwyn Films, has more recently distributed films with Jewish themes, such as the documentary "Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles", which explores the impact of "Fiddler on the Roof" on Jewish culture and the immigrant experience. However, this is the company's work in a different era, not Goldwyn himself.
(According to legend, at a heated story conference, Goldwyn scolded someone—in most accounts, Mrs. Dorothy Parker, who recalled he had once been a glove maker—who responded to him, "Don't you point that finger at me. I knew it when it had a thimble on it!")Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, literary critic and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays based in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. The Rothschild family is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish noble banking family originally from Frankfurt. The family's documented history starts in 16th-century ...
When he met the visiting hero, Field Marshal Montgomery of the British World War II, he said, BETTER A GOOD ENEMY THAN A BAD FRIEND in Yiddish (Beser a guter soyne eyder a shlekhter fraynd.) .
Goldwyn died of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles in 1974. In the 1980s, the Samuel Goldwyn Studio was sold to Warner Bros. There is a theater named after him in Beverly Hills and he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1631 Vine Street for his contributions to motion pictures on February 8, 1960.
He may have made errors in his English, but he knew how to make movies.
Resource:
Book: The Story of Yiddish, by Neal Karlen
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