Thoughts on Hester Street

     On Criterion last week, I watched Hester Street, a 1975 comedy-drama written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, adapted from Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. The film focuses on the lives of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who move to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1896, and live on Hester Street. Yankel (Steven Keats) is a recent immigrant, who has become fluent in English, works in a sweatshop, goes by the anglicized name Jake, and quickly assimilates into American culture. Despite that he is married, and awaiting the arrival of his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and his son Yossele, he has an affair with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a Polish Jewish immigrant who doesn't know that he is married. 

    When Gitl arrives, she is an Orthodox Jewish woman who keeps her hair covered in a wig, and Yankel immediately pressures her to let her natural hair be shown in public, emphasizing that they are in America now. But Gitl is shy and apprehensive in this new country, she only speaks Yiddish and very little English, and is the target of her husband's abuse, who demands that their son should be known as "Joey" from now on. Yankel is also mocking and bullying towards Bernstein (Mel Howard), another Jewish immigrant who seems more meek and quiet in comparison to Yankel's loudness. Mamie is horrified to learn that "Jake" is married, and treated her like his mistress, as when she comes to his home (a small tenement apartment consisting of a kitchen/living room combo and a bedroom) and discovers that he has a wife and child. Yankel covers it up for Gitl, claiming she's one of his co-workers at his job, but she learns the truth through their neighbor, Mrs. Karvarsky (Doris Roberts).

    The film is really fascinating to watch, as a black-and-white movie meant to evoke old photographs of Jewish ancestors who emigrated to the U.S. to escape persecution by the Cossacks in Russia and Eastern Europe, and living in their own ghetto neighborhood where they speak Yiddish and don't interact with the world outside of it. Gitl, late in the film, asks Yankel "Where are all the gentiles?" That for all of Yankel's talk about how they are in America now and should assimilate with English names and customs, that they are still essentially in their same community across an ocean.

    Carol Kane was fantastic in this film, as a theater actor who had only appeared in a few films at this time, including Dog Day Afternoon and The Last Detail. Her wide, searching eyes and limited dialogue speaks so much, as an immigrant woman realizing that she's still in the same world, with a sexist husband that sees their marriage as one of convenience and control, not of love or respect. She wants to hold onto her customs instead of outright rejecting them when being on American shores, with speaking Yiddish and keeping her hair covered. Joan Micklin Silver's adaptation of the novel and her writing of Gitl is a feminist retelling, and I agree with Andrew Craddock on Letterboxd who described Kane's portrayal as "a delicate, quietly defiant performance."

    It's a very intimate and personal film, about Jewish life in New York City, depicting immigrant life with overhead shots of the streets with carts and carriages and English and Yiddish intermingled spoken. Silver chose to do this project because of her own Jewish heritage, and her family's reluctance to talk about their immigration experience several decades prior, and she wanted to honor their legacy.

    50 years later, it holds up well as a great film, and rightfully earned Kane an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. I'm really glad that I watched it, and the subject matter relates well to my day job as an archivist of Jewish historical archives.