Edmund Zayenda

Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz--tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating sukkot--but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.

Ada Dziewanowska, a spirited landowner’s daughter, is sent to a Kraków boarding school to be “tamed,” where she secretly appears in an operetta and unexpectedly falls in love with Fred Orzelski, ironically the very suitor her parents had long planned for her.