People in the Jewish Ghetto

TODAY, NEW YORK'S Hester Street offers up an ethnic potpourri. One end of the street is Italian, another is Puerto Rican, and a recent New York Times article reports that "Hester Street's tomorrow, which has already begun today, is clearly Chinese-American." Joan Micklin Silver's film by the same name is set at the turn of the century, a time when the street was a major center of activity in New York's Jewish ghetto, and the men who shuffled down its sidewalks were mumbling Yiddish under their beards.

Hester Street is the story of a Jewish family that cannot hold together under the strains of reunion in America. Jake Pakovnik has arrived in America before his wife and young son, and has had time to affect the trappings of his adopted country. Although he works in a sweatshop, Jake sports a three-piece suit and keeps a girlfriend on the side.

Problems arise when Jake's wife and son arrive from Russia. From the moment that they peer at each other through the immigration fence at Ellis Island, it is evident that Gitl (Carol Kane) and Yossele (Paul Freedman) will have trouble adjusting to Jake's foreign lifestyle. Jake, whose name was formerly Yaakov, now insists that they change their son's name from Yossele to Joey. He objects to his wife's wig as a vestige of the old country and insists that she wear her hair naturally.

Gitl makes a valiant effort, but cannot conform to her husband's new ways. With his American values, Jake claims that he is twice as good a man as their boarder, Bernstein, because he makes twice as much money. Perhaps the sweatshop boss best summarizes the differences between the Old and New Worlds when he observes that in America, "the peddler becomes the boss and the Yeshiva student sits at the sewing machine." At one point, as her neighbor Mrs. Kavarsky is squeezing a groaning Gitl into a corset for that sleek American look, she tells her, "You wanna be in America, you gotta hurt."

But Gitl can only take so much pain. She grows progressively more despondent over her justifiable suspicions that Jake is still seeing his old girlfriend. Tensions come to a head when he finds his wife with her hair seemingly french-fried in a hapless attempt to imitate American styles. They erupt out of mutual frustration, he hits her, and their scuffle ends several scenes later in an Orthodox Jewish divorce. Jake runs off with his girlfriend, and Gitl makes plans to marry Bernstein.

Admittedly, the subject of this film--Jewish identity in the New World--is pretty well worn; everybody from Ernest Hemingway to Phillip Roth has used it with varying degrees of success. The distinctive feature of the topic in this film is that, unlike Robert Cohn or Alexander Portnoy, the principal character never undergoes a genuine identity crisis. Jake never really denies his Jewishness; upon learning of his father's death, he dons the ceremonial Jewish mourning shawl, and even his girlfriend, Mamie Fein, is Jewish. Jake's Jewishness never comes into question because he never departs from the Jewish community. Rather than rejecting his Jewishness, Jake is simply embracing as much of America as he can. "I'm an American, a Yankee, that's all I am," he says.

Fortunately, the Yiddish in this film does not degenerate in a Fiddler on the Roof-like parody of Jewish mannerisms. Silver has wisely avoided this pitfall by having her characters converse in Yiddish where appropriate, and translating the conversation with subtitles. And while such classic Yiddishisms as "You vont that I should... "remain, they sound thoroughly plausible within the greater framework of this film. Mrs. Kavarsky is the film's greatest source of acerbic Yiddish wit, with such comments as "You can't pee up my back and make me think it's rain." She is the archetypal yente, always offering advice and sticking her nose in her neighbors' affairs. In spite of this, she remains a likeable character. As much as she pries into others' business--and this is a measure of how Hester Street avoids callous stereotyping--she still has their interests at heart, as demonstrated by her attempts to reconcile Jake and Gitl over their differences.

SHOT IN SOFT black and white, this film has an air of innocence and charm about it. It conveys no really profound emotions, but a certain light pathos makes it appealing. The film's best scene is a picnic in the woods. Jake, Gitl, Joey and Bernstein, gather up the proper equipment and head into the woods. Just as they break through a clearing, a light rag picks up for background music, establishing a light mood. As sunlight streams through the trees, Jake starts up a game of all-American baseball with his son; there's something whimsical about this little group eating lunch on the grass, all of them feeling uncomfortable in their stiff clothing. This thread of light comedy runs throughout Hester Street.

Carol Kane gives an amazing performance as Gitl. She exercises an absolute control over her movements and facial expressions, projecting an aura of quiet power throughout the film. Her sallow complexion and penetrating eyes give her face a strongly soulful quality. Kane undergoes an extraordinary transformation during the course of the film. At first an ugly duckling, she blossoms into a strikingly attractive woman by the end of the film; a submissive wife when she steps off the boat, she eventually emerges as an independent and assertive figure. The rest of the film's performances are generally solid, with only a few flaws such as Steven Keats's occasionally wooden portrayal of Jake. Keats's performance amounts to little more than bluster at times. His major problem is his inability to decide exactly how much he would like to Americanize Jake.

Purists might complain that Hester Street presents an inaccurate picture of New York Jewish ghettoes at the turn of the century. This is true, but immaterial. According to this film, no one lived in squalor, and the worst aspect of the sweatshops was an occasional snide comment from the boss. The photographer Jacob Riis, who depicted the terrible conditions of living in New York's Jewish ghetto at the turn of the century, would have been horrified by the distortion in this film. But rather than a scathing social portrait of the era, Silver has set out to create a compelling story about characters who might have lived at the time. By and large, she has succeeded.