The Metaphoric Mother in Moyshe Leib Halpern’s and Langston Hughes’s Poetry

The relationship between young men and their mothers occupies a central role in a wide range of Jewish and African American works written in the 1920s. Moyshe Leib Halpern’s Yiddish poem “In the Golden Land” and Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” both portray a deliberately constructed relationship between the speakers (sons) and their mothers that depicts the attempt to transition from incongruous outsider to established successful American. Both powerful poems poignantly capture the intertwining identities of a mother and her son, as well as the tendency to overly idealize that relationship. These poets depict the Jewish immigrant and the Black American respectively coping with their shared failed American dream by inventing the next best thing: voices of mothers who could offer them solace and verbalize their frustrating draining realities. As Andrew O’Reilly notes, “maternity [is] not understood to be a subject position,” often leading writers to create mothers who only exist in relation to their offspring. The mothers in Halpern and Hughes’ poems exist solely to debunk the fantastical metaphors about America; the mothers show their sons that their past and fidelity to tradition and hard work are not merely an antidote for failure but a prescription for success. While these mothers possess unique individual voices that prompt the reader to see them as stand-alone individuals, I would like to argue that they become metaphors themselves, turning into manifestations of the desires and hopes of their sons, who cope with their failures by conjuring a guiding and understanding maternal ear. Due to this maternal intimacy, the sons’ successes and failures in Halpern and Hughes’ poems become the mothers’ success and failure, and the trauma each generation endures becomes shared generational trauma.