From the archive: Mah-Jongg, still revered by the senior set

This story was originally published in Newsday on February 1, 1999.

DURING the lazy afternoons of pre-adolescence, Hope Edelman played mah-jongg with her girlfriends.

"We tried to emulate our mothers," she remembered. They used an inexpensive set with Chinese-style tiles made of cardboard. But for this klatch of imaginative 10-year-olds, the ambience was genuine.

"We'd sit on the bedroom floor and gossip, pretending we were our mothers. We'd set out little dishes of candy and we'd have little purses filled with coins to bet on the games. We'd play for hours, sitting around the mah-jongg board, talking about our make-believe husbands, just like our mothers did."

A member of a post-jongg generation, Edelman never played the game as an adult. A future writer, she went off to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., where she met dozens of young women who had never even heard about mah-jongg. But the game has remained a precious memory of her childhood when her late mother and her friends adopted the ancient Chinese game as a ritual in the social life of the Jewish community.

Edelman, now 34, is one of more than a dozen women - and a few men - who recall those days in a new documentary called "Mah Jong: The Tiles That Bind."

The video tells the curious story of the Americanized version of the Chinese game from its introduction in the United States in 1923 to the present. Today, 200,000 to 300,000 players still gather around mah-jongg boards once or twice a week while an unknown number have found the game in cyberspace - in mah-jongg chat rooms on the Internet, where four far-flung opponents may compete. Others play on CD-ROMS, such as RomTech's "Mah Jong: The Game of Four Wings," matching wits with a trio of computer-programed opponents.

But in the real world of mah-jongg, the great majority of players constitutes something of an endangered species. Tournament organizers say that about 75 percent of the players are over 50, and Jewish women are still the predominant participants, by a 2-to-1 ratio.

In "The Tiles That Bind," however, the game seems alive and well. In a 32-minute collage of mah-jongg memories, the documentary offers a nostalgic look at the impact of the game in Jewish communities before and after World War II - and at the possibility that mah-jongg may attract a wider, younger audience as well, with as many as 8,000 new sets sold annually around the country.

The video is the handiwork of two young filmmakers: Phyllis Heller, who grew up in Queens, and Bari Pearlman, who grew up in Spring Valley, N.Y. In their early 30s, they met at the State University at Binghamton a dozen years ago, studying English and film. Later Heller became a publicist while Pearlman went on to graduate school, not sure she really wanted a life in academia. Six years ago, Heller telephoned her old friend and said, "I have an idea for a film."

They completed the video in 1997 for less than $ 20,000 and unveiled it at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July. Soon after the debut, the video won an American Film Institute award as well as a Jurors Choice prize at a Berkeley film festival. Screened at a half-dozenfilm festivals in 1998, four more showings are scheduled in February and March - at Jewish film festivals in Houston, San Diego, Minneapolis and Dallas. The video also has been submitted to PBS for possible airing on P.O.V., its showcase for independent filmmakers. (The video is not currently available to the public.)

The idea for the film goes back to Heller's childhood in Woodhaven, where she had a grade-school pal named Eddie Chang, whose family owned a local candy store. In the backroom, mah-jongg was played every afternoon.

While Heller's mother never played, her ex-mother-in-law had a room filled with mah-jongg trophies - and the game's roots in both Jewish and Chinese cultures intrigued her for years. When her aunt offered her a silver set as an engagement gift in 1993, she opted for a video camera instead. She and Pearlman started shooting in late 1994, attending their first mah-jongg tournament at a hotel outside Atlantic City, run by organizer Larry Krams, lining up their first video subjects.

The filmmakers do not delve into the history of the game or a how-to-play approach. "We weren't trying for a definitive piece, like a Ken Burns documentary," Heller said. She wanted a more lighthearted approach, she said, "with people just hanging out, playing, gossiping, talking about the game."

The approach, Pearlman noted, is "something like folk history." Apparently, they have struck a chord in several generations. At a number of screenings at Jewish film festivals, museums and synagogues, the co-director said, "People came up to us with tears in their eyes, to thank us, because the film reminded them of their mothers playing mah-jongg." NO ONE is sure why mah-jongg became so popular in Jewish communities. But the game is still revered by many who learned to play 50 years ago and by their children, now grown, who witnessed those special evenings when "the mah-jongg ladies" would arrive for hours of gossip, specially prepared snacks and the clinking sound of tiles.

In "The Tiles That Bind," both players and nonplayers are the stars. Renee Cooper, for instance, learned the game in 1944, when her fiance, Morris, was overseas in the Army. At age 77, living in Merrick now, she still plays twice a week. Lucy Solinsky remembers a time when there were no tennis clubs or television sets. "You had a telephone and you had mah-jongg," she tells the camera. April Orsuto, a younger player, recalled how she swore never to do what her mother did. "But here I am playing more than she did."

Among the youthful onlookers was Russell Bloom of Manhattan, who remembers game nights at his mother's house. "You didn't bother her when it was mah-jongg night, even if the house was falling." When someone drew a winning hand, drawing the right assortment of 14 tiles, a voice would scream: "MAH-JONGG!"

"As a kid, sleeping on a folding bed in the next room," says Bloom, "if you could sleep through that, you could sleep through the war."

Aaron Shatzer, a dentist from Roslyn, also was a young spectator and never forgot the echoes of Brooklyn neighborhood gossip being exchanged across the table. Whispering to the camera, he re-created the tone: "Did you hear about the people on the third floor? They're getting divorced." All the news, as well as tiles, were passed from player to player.

"Mah-jongg was more than a game. Mah-jongg was like life itself," Shatzer, 55, recounts on the video. "The front doorbell would ring at 7:30 p.m. You could set your clock by that . . . And the girls would arrive. People with names like Minnie and Fay and Bertha and Ethel and Selma." In Brooklyn, he reflects, "we thought they probably were playing in the White House on Friday nights at 7:30. Who knows?"

Snacks were prepared with special care for mah-jongg nights. Carefully sliced pineapple, for example, was always decorated with cherries. There was mandelbrot and a variety of noshes. "You were told that if you touched it before they started or before the ladies arrived, you'd get killed," Shatzer said.

Dorothy Krams delivers the video's curtain lines: "We had the same girlfriends for 40 years. Their children got married. They may have gotten divorced. They may have their second or third husband. But the one stable force was that mah-jongg game." Among her generation, there is still an old adage: "When we leave this world, the last one to go brings the mah-jongg set." FOR Renee Cooper, mah-jongg has also meant friendship for almost 54 years. She began to play in 1944 to enhance her war-torn social life. "All the men were away and my friends and I decided it was time we learned to do something together, not go to the city, not go to bars. So we learned to play mah-jongg," she said during a break in a recent mah-jongg session in Baldwin.

After a 24-hour marathon with her college friends, she dreamed about mah-jongg tiles for two straight nights - a procession of bams, dots, craks, flowers, dragons and winds, the various mah-jongg suits - analogous to spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds in a standard deck of playing cards.

The game resembles gin rummy, with each player drawing 14 tiles from a bank of tiles, then continuing to draw and discard in turn until a winner declares her mah-jongg, completing any of about 50 winning combinations.

Now widowed, Cooper plays mah-jongg twice a week. But for her, winning was never what the game was about. "I love the people I play with. I love meeting new people." -- -- --

Games with tiles are hardly new. They played something like backgammon in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C. In Egypt, Pharoah Tutankhamen was buried with his favorite board game. And mah-jongg dates to the time of Confucius, about 2,000 years ago, when the game was reserved for China's ruling classes.

All of that changed in 1911 when the modern Chinese republic was founded, and mah-jongg became China's national game - but not exactly for the masses. Only men were permitted to play in gambling parlors. After World War I, Joseph Babcock, an American representing Standard Oil in China, was fascinated by the phenomenon and was determined to bring the game home.

In the early 20s, Babcock founded the Mah Jongg Sales Company of America, hiring Chinese craftsmen to design a simplified game for American players, placing Arabic numerals on the Chinese tiles.

The target, at first, was an elite market - America's country clubs. Mah-jongg was the perfect pastime in the Roaring 20s for those who could afford $ 400 or $ 500 for an imported set, an investment of about $ 4,000 in today's economy.

But even in this heady era, the Milton Bradley toy company, founded in the 1860s, was in bad shape. The company, however, was not blind to new ideas, James J. Shea, Bradley's chairman in the 1960s, wrote in a company history.

In 1922, recognizing the mah-jongg craze sweeping the country, Bradley rushed out a new version of the game at popular prices, and business boomed. "Marketed under the name, 'The Chinese Game, mah-jongg was one of the biggest and quickest successes the company has had. For several months, its plants operated 24 hours a day to keep up with orders, until competitors began to take up the slack," Shea wrote. The game saved the company.

But by the early 1940s, Milton Bradley and its rival, Parker Brothers, had dropped out of the mah-jongg market. While interest in the game did not die out, demand for new sets was apparently too low to entice the major gamesters to continue production.

"Today, no one can hazard an accurate guess as to why the game was popular," Shea said, "or why its popularity faded to the point where most people now haven't the vaguest notion of what it was about."

Most people, perhaps - except those in Jewish and Chinese communities across the country. In the Jewish community, the National Mah Jong League played a crucial role in making the game a distinctly Jewish experience in thousands of homes.

A nonprofit agency, the league was founded in 1937 to standardize the American-style game. Each year, its book of rules reshapes the nature of the game, offering players a revised assortment of winning hands and new point values. With a membership of about 200,000, the league sells its card for $ 5.95 as well as some 1,500 new mah-jongg sets a year, ranging from $ 127 to $ 145 per set.

The manufacture of mah-jongg sets is certainly not a big ticket item, agreed league president Ruth Unger, since the tiles are hardly in the category of destructible toys. "A new set is something you buy once or twice in a lifetime. It's not like the toy a kid breaks after a month." But she shrugged off the suggestion that the game peaked in the 1930s. "The boom is now," she insisted, noting that when she signed up as a volunteer in 1964, the league's membership was less than 100,000.

It was mah-jongg's connection with charitable causes, she said, that first popularized the game among Jewish women. "From the start, the league gave a rebate for charity to each person who brought in 35 new members," Unger said. Now, a portion of the annual proceeds - $ 70,000 to $ 80,000 last year - is set aside for selected causes. A recent recipient was the Mount Sinai Breast Health Resource Center.

And like the early days, younger women are now picking up the game, she said. "I see professional women, whose mothers once played, starting clubs of their own. Some vowed they'd never be like their mothers. Now they may say, 'I can't believe I'm doing this! But they are. Even my own daughter-in-law is playing again."

A more sinister theory about mah-jongg's decline in the 30s is held by Larry Krams, who runs a dozen tournaments around the country. In a phrase, Krams said, "It was anti-Semitism."

The virulent hatred of Jews in that era shaped the image of mah-jongg as "the Jewish game," he said in a phone interview from Florida. By the late 20s, after the game spread to Jewish country clubs, it had filtered down to middle-class Jewish communties, he said. "And within a few years, non-Jews dropped the game."

But his thesis does not win immediate support from Jewish social historians. While anti-Semitism was intense in the America of the 1930s, said Deborah Dash Moore, "most of it was focused on keeping Jews out and apart . . . What Jews were doing in their own country clubs or neighborhoods probably did not matter."

But historians are curious about the postwar popularity of mah-jongg among Jewish women. Moore, who teaches a course in American Jewish culture at Vassar College, speculates that the gambling factor in mah-jongg may have enhanced its acceptance, even as a penny-ante game for most players. "There aren't many strictures against gambling in Jewish culture, as in some aspects of Protestant culture," Moore said. "People are allowed to play games - and you could come home with a little money."

More significant is the game's role in bringing women together, she said. "It took place in people's homes, at a time when women had few public places to meet regularly.

A younger generation of assimilated Jewish women might have been embarrassed by their mothers involvement in the game, but a new generation has come along that is less critical of popular culture, Moore said. "There seems to be more willingness to look at middle-class behavior and not label it as bourgeoise and therefore uninteresting."

The use of mah-jongg to raise funds was also significant, said historian Jenna Weissman Joselit. Philanthropic organizations such as Hadassah integrated the game into their calendar of fund-raising activities, she noted, which enhanced its acceptability for a generation of women who were daughters of immigrants.

But for decades, the game also has been a target for self-deprecating satire. In a 1960s club routine, for instance, Woody Allen described his hypersensitive mother's reaction to his decision to quit college - by locking herself in the bathroom and attempting to swallow her mah-jongg tiles.

Daniel Soyer, who teaches a course on immigrant history at Fordham, agreed that it would a mistake to assume mah-jongg was rejected by non-Jews for anti-Semitic reasons. "But even within the Jewish community, the game ended up with a comical reputation, associated with a somewhat kitschy type of parvenu that younger, more educated Jews did not take very seriously."

Hope Edelman, for instance, felt no connection with the game as an adult. "At 20, it was not something for my generation, not a hobby for a career woman," she said in a phone interview from her California home. She thought of the game as a pastime of nonworking women in suburbia.

But in "The Tiles That Bind," she speaks longingly about the days when her mother and her friends played mah-jongg. "I have images of all of them with their hands in the middle, mixing the tiles, these long, red, perfectly manicured nails, and the nails and the tiles all clicking together," she says.

As a child, she thought the tiles were precious ivory, not plastic, and had no idea how this Chinese game wound up in the dens of suburban Jewish women in Rockland County.

Her mother died when she was 16, a loss she wrote about a few years ago in a memoir "Motherless Daughters." In the video, she talks about her mother's old mah-jongg set, now an irreplaceable family possession. "We don't have use for it," she says, "but we can't bear to give it away, because of the memories of my mother. We hang on to the game as a longs-tanding traditional object, as if giving away the set would be like giving away the mother we remember."