'Hester Street' Is An Immigrant Tale Worth Seeking Out [NYFF Review]

“Hester Street,” Joan Micklin Silver’s classic 1975 feature debut, portrays with momentous poignancy the Jewish immigrant experience in turn-of-the-century New York City: the lure of assimilation and the falling-away of tradition; the awesome, awful promise of becoming American. Newly restored in a 4K version that retains the 35mm original’s Jacob Riis-like black-and-white textures of Lower East Side tenement life, it’s a vision of the city on the brink of modernity, willed into existence at the height of the New Hollywood by a woman unaffiliated with any movement.

Here’s an old Jewish joke:

Yankel, a traditional Jew, kisses his family in the shtetl goodbye as he sets out to make his fortune in the new world of America. A year later, his mother comes to be with him in New York. She takes one look at him in disbelief, “Yankele, what happened to your beard and pay’as?” “Mama,” her devoted son replied, “this is America. I have to fit in to be successful!! And, by the way, call me Jake.” “Oy, but Kosher, you still eat kosher, don’t you?” “Mama, I mix with all kinds of people these days, my clients and associates; I can’t keep kosher in my circles.” The mother sighs, “But at least the holy Sabbath, you still observe Shabbas?” “Mama, Saturday is the biggest shopping day of the week. I would lose my business in a minute if I didn’t work on Saturday.” “Yankele, tell me, are you still circumcised?!”

Silver, whose Jewish parents were born in Russia, had directed educational films and tried to break into the industry with little success until she and her husband, the New York real estate developer Raphael Silver, decided to themselves produce and distribute Hester Street, an adaptation of the novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto,” by the influential Yiddish author and newspaperman Abraham Cahan. Appropriately, given Raphael Silver’s business interests (and that of Charles Cohen, the developer and film impresario whose Cohen Film Group is releasing the restoration), real estate is crucial to the plot of “Hester Street.”

“Some country, America!” Despite his thick Eastern European accent, Jake (Steven Keats) is a real Yankee Doodle Dandy. He works in a sweatshop, hunched over a sewing machine, but with his saloonkeeper mustache and natty checked cap, he turns the head of Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), likewise foreign-born. However, you wouldn’t know it from her lacy shirtwaist dresses and feathery hats. When Jake’s landlady dies, he moves from the parlor to the bedroom and takes in a boarder, Bernstein (Mel Howard), a Talmudic scholar in the Old Country but a fellow sweatshop toiler in the New World. Jake borrows $25 (real money!) from Mamie to furnish the apartment—but receives word from home that his father has died and sends for his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and son Yossele. As it turns out, Jake’s real name is “Yankel”—that’s what Gitl calls him at Ellis Island, though she barely recognizes him without his beard. He looks “like a nobleman,” she says in awe, though he’s soon enough put in his place by the official at Ellis Island who smirks at Jake’s Hebrew marriage certificate and peasant wife fresh from the shtetl.

At home, Jake and Gitl speak in subtitled Yiddish. Is their son named Yossele, or Jake’s preferred “Joey”? Either way, as the child of immigrants, he’s the repository of his parents’ aspirations, torn between obligations to the old world (Bernstein teaches him the Hebrew alphabet) and the possibility of reinvention in the new (Jake, ignorant of the Constitution, proclaims that the boy will someday be President).

Carol Kane, 21 years old at the time of filming, received her only Oscar nomination to date for “Hester Street,” losing Best Actress to Louise Fletcher in the year of the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” sweep. She’s a marvel here, a figure genuinely out of the past, looking in her wigs and headscarves both like a little girl and like someone who was never young. She moves with a tentativeness that conveys the future shock of this moment in history while her eyes take in the world in marvelment and implore her husband for acknowledgment and connection. Your heart breaks—and so does Jake’s, even as he’s embarrassed by her.

“Hester Street “’s low budget—the quoted figure is sometimes $320,000, sometimes $370,000—works to its advantage. Much of the money seems to have gone into two sets: Jake and Gitl’s cramped apartment, with its soot-stained wallpaper, and the street where they live, which teems with horse-drawn wagons, peddlers’ carts, shabby awnings, and signs for the bathhouse (remember, no running water at home), stacks of textiles, crates of vegetables, barrels of pickles, sawdust all over Hester Street. Shooting the single street set from different angles, Silver cannot—does not—disguise how tiny Jake and Gitl’s sliver of America is.

Gitl’s world extends perhaps a block or two in any direction—as she says during a late-movie excursion to Central Park, they have to take the train for an hour to see a tree. By “train,” she means Manhattan’s old elevated lines since Hester Street is set a decade before the New York City subway began running. 1896 is on the cusp of so many things that would bind the nation closer together. In the park, on that rare and arduous excursion out of their slum, Jake teaches Joey how to play baseball—a touching all-American father-son bonding experience, with a reminder, in Jake’s funny old-timey windup, that on the other side of 1900 will come the World Series, a national phenomenon and shared American mythology fostered by a growing mass media. The way Jake runs the bases, playing with his son, almost looks like an undercranked newsreel. In fact, several sequences have a choppy early-cinema feel appropriate for a movie set in the same year Edison’s Vitascope first projected motion pictures to the public in New York.

The 20th century seems imminent and ironically closer for Gitl than for poor Jake. By the film’s neat, almost O. Henry-esque ending, you can hear a new shrewdness in Gitl’s voice. She begins to find herself, to join a new tribe: the New York Jew.

Silver would pick up the story of American Jewish assimilation in her most remarkable film, the 1988 masterpiece “Crossing Delancey,” set 90-odd years later than the events of “Hester Street” and three blocks north. Another frizzy-haired movie goddess, Amy Irving, stars in a gender-swapped version of the “Hester Street” reject-tradition-embrace-modernity love triangle: She must choose between the European novelist played by Jeroen Krabbé, and his swank and worldly life-of-the-mind uptown milieu, and Peter Riegert’s pickle merchant, whose wares are dispensed from old wooden barrels with a briny whiff of the tenement days. Watch “Hester Street” and “Crossing Delancey” back-to-back, and a century of Jewish life in New York City is conjured in the break between the two features—it’s the best way to grasp the scope of Silver’s achievement fully.

Though “Hester Street” has always been well-regarded—it was added to the National Film Registry in 2011—it was not until shortly before her death at the age of 85, on the last day of 2020, that Joan Micklin Silver was widely recognized as a major artist. For New York cinephiles, she was the defining auteur of the MoviePass years. The hip new venues that emerged in the middle of the 2010s—Charles Cohen’s relaunched Quad Cinema, and the Metrograph, blocks from Hester Street, in the epicenter of Lower Manhattan’s hyperdrive gentrification—had Silver’s films in frequent rotation, giving a sense of her unparalleled feel for lived-in, literary detail and neurotic melancholy: her pitch-perfect alt-weekly dramedy “Between the Lines,” the salvaged original cut of her Ann Beattie adaptation “Chilly Scenes of Winter,” and the charming late-in-life “A Fish in the Bathtub” which picks up where “Crossing Delancey” left off, documenting the disputes of an old married couple (comedic duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara) who’ve moved to the suburbs and left the Lower East Side to the new Chinese immigrants. Each was a revelation to rediscover and a common currency for moviegoers, like me, then in the habit of swiping a debit card preloaded with venture capital so we could see our friends in the lobby, all the while knowing we were living through a golden age. Post-pandemic, the young programming and publicity teams who launched those splashy new theaters and spearheaded Silver’s rediscovery have moved on; for some of us, then, “Hester Street” is an aching New York period piece in more ways than one. [A]