I Want to Be a Mother

As her family happily prepares for the wedding of her niece Celia, Amelia sits alone in her room playing a mournful phonograph record. Her sister-in-law, Bas Sheva, explains to a friend of Sol Waldman, the bridegroom, that Amelia was deceived in love twenty years earlier, after which she was taken to a hospital in critical condition. Following Celia's birth, Amelia never considered marriage and has loved Celia like a mother. Bas Sheva's husband Jacob, who has not spoken to his sister for twenty years, now goes into Amelia's room, and she cries in his arms. He insists that no one must know their secret, that Amelia, not Bas Sheva, is really Celia's mother, and orders Amelia, who is almost out of control with suffering, to give Celia her blessing at their home rather than at the synagogue, where the wedding is to take place. Amelia agrees, but during the ceremony, she rushes to the synagogue, where unseen by others, she watches Celia and Sol take their vows. Six months later, on the day before Sol is to graduate and become a full-fledged doctor, Celia, who is jealous of Sol's admiration for Amelia, overhears them innocently express their love for one another. Sol quells Celia's suspicions, but after he receives a telegram that his father from California, who had been unable to attend the wedding, will arrive the next day, Celia sees Sol and Amelia dancing in joy. Celia jealously tells Sol that either Amelia must leave or she will. Amelia sadly says goodbye to the family, but, unable to bear her suffering any longer, she tells Celia the truth. Jacob then explains to a shocked Bas Sheva that when Bas Sheva gave birth to a dead child, the doctor said that the death of the child would kill her. To save her life and Amelia from shame, he put the child just born to Amelia by Bas Sheva's side. Before Sol's father Aaron arrives, Celia embraces Amelia and, to her joy, calls her "mama." Aaron happily greets his daughter-in-law and her family, and upon learning that Jacob is a Russian from Suvalk, a city in Poland, he relates that twenty years earlier, while traveling there for an American oil company, he met a very learned woman and left her a book which he forgot to retrieve. Amelia recognizes Aaron as her long-ago lover and rebukes him. It appears that both Sol and Celia are Aaron's children, until later, he recovers from being confused and reveals that Sol was really the product of his deceased wife's first marriage. Aaron then proposes to Amelia, who returns the book and then agrees to go with it.