Joan Micklin Silver (1975)
In the pre-Sundance era of American independent film-making, writer-director Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature enjoyed unusual success. Hester Street got some good reviews, fared well at the box office (Wikipedia shows takings of $5m from a $370,000 budget) and earned its lead actress Carol Kane a surprise Oscar nomination. Micklin Silver’s screenplay is adapted from Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, first published in 1896. Yekl is a novella and Hester Street, which runs ninety minutes, a small-scale drama with barely a subplot in sight. But the theme is important (though never self-important) and the characters are engaging.
The setting is the Jewish immigrant quarter on New York’s Lower East Side, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The people are Ashkenazi Jews, mostly of Russian origin; the drama derives from the tensions between their preserving traditions of the old country and assimilating into the culture of the new. Yankel (Steven Keats) has acculturated quickly in America. He now goes by the name of Jake; he’s having an affair with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a Polish immigrant who works at a dance ‘academy’ and aspires to set up her own. Jake borrows money from Mamie, though he’s the best paid worker in a tailoring business, where he spends his days hunched over a sewing machine. He works in the sweatshop opposite Bernstein (Mel Howard), Yeshiva-educated and in mourning for a life from which emigration has exiled him. Bernstein boards with Jake because he can’t afford anything better. Jake has a wife and a young son back in Russia; when his own father dies, they cross the Atlantic to join Jake in Manhattan. The wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), is frustrating to her husband because she’s ill-prepared and ill-disposed to Americanise. She has no English. As a married Jewess, she insists on wearing a wig or a kerchief to cover her own hair. Jake wants their son Yossele (Paul Freedman) to be known as Joey from now on but Gitl digs her heels in. Distressed by but resistant to her blowhard husband’s bullying, she’s increasingly drawn to the sad-eyed, courteous Bernstein.
Joan Micklin Silver seems to make her cultural sympathies instantly clear. Hester Street’s opening sequence is set in Mamie’s workplace, owned by Feltner (Stephen Strimpell): couples move around the cramped dance floor and change partners (predicting the film’s conclusion). After the dance class, Jake, Mamie, Feltner and others drink and chat in a bar, where they’re joined by, and make light-hearted fun of, a younger Jewish immigrant (Zane Lasky), just off the boat and still wearing a traditional beard and hat. Later, when Gitl and Bernstein have begun to talk together while Jake is out drinking or womanising, they declare, in Yiddish, ‘a pox on Columbus’. Although this too is light-hearted, they mean what they say. Away from his New Home sewing machine (a real make put to symbolic use), Bernstein continues to study his holy books. He does so out of a sense of duty but the books are also a linus blanket.
Micklin Silver turns out to be far from thoroughly traditional, though. Gitl’s gradual emergence from an oppressive marriage is at the heart of Hester Street and, in the climax to the story, she and Jake divorce. The officiating rabbi (Zvee Scooler) reminds the ex-couple of the dictates of Jewish law: a divorced husband is free to marry again immediately while his former wife must wait at least ninety-one days to do so. Micklin Silver uses the rabbi’s words not just to make a feminist point but to foreshadow her neat, just-desserts conclusion. As Jake and Mamie rush off to wed, Jake learns that his new bride, thanks to the divorce settlement, is less well off than he thought – a strong hint that he’ll repent at leisure. In contrast, Gitl walks down the street unhurriedly with Bernstein and the son she now calls Joey. She also speaks English and shows her own hair; her husband-to-be is no longer submerged in regret for what he lost in coming to America. With the money Gitl obtained in exchange for the divorce, she and Bernstein plan to open a grocery store. They discuss whether to stock sodas and seltzers. The last line of the script – Bernstein’s – is ‘we mustn’t be too quick to say this or that’.
Everything about Carol Kane’s gently blossoming Gitl and Mel Howard’s droll, melancholy Bernstein is eloquently natural. Paul Freedman’s Yossele-Joey, who resembles his pale, fair-haired mother so much more than his swarthy, rakish father, is also very right, though the boy’s part is underwritten. He gets on well with kind, earnest Bernstein but also with the more exuberant Jake – it’s not clear what effect the rift between his parents has on the child. There’s some coarse, stagy acting in smaller parts – how coarse seems to depend on how small the part. Robert Lesser is excruciatingly crude in his one scene as Mamie’s lawyer, ineptly negotiating a divorce deal with Gitl. Doris Roberts has the screen time to turn Mrs Kavarsky, who seems at first a cartoon nosy neighbour and gossip, into a more rounded character. The main weakness of Hester Street is Steven Keats’s Jake. Instead of showing, as he needs to do, the strain of Jake’s determination to be American, Keats struggles to convince that he was ever anything else (and particularly with sustaining the accent meant to show his European origins). His screen presence is strong enough but contains not a trace of the old country: it’s impossible to believe Jake was once like the bearded, prayerful greenhorn immigrant in the bar at the start of the film.
Joan Micklin Silver chose to shoot in black and white (the cinematographer is Kenneth Van Sickle). This makes sense: her audience is familiar with the world that Hester Street brings to life primarily through monochrome photographs of the period. Micklin Silver ends, however, with a freeze frame that doesn’t suggest a still. This shot of Gitl and Bernstein in a busy Manhattan street conveys, rather, suddenly arrested motion – that these people were moving on the screen a split-second before. William Bolcom arranged the music, by Herbert L Clarke (who was famous chiefly as a cornet player: Gerard Schwarz plays the score’s cornet solo). This soundtrack is always agreeable and occasionally very effective – for example, as accompaniment to Jake and Joey’s pretend baseball game on a picnic outing. At other times the music tends to overstress that Hester Street is minor but that’s never enough to detract from the film’s great interest and real charm.
25 August 2022
