A new restoration of
HESTER STREET
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver
With Steven Keats, Carol Kane, Mel Howard
1974 > USA > 1 hr 32 mins
New York’s Lower East Side, circa 1896, was a battleground between the Old World and the New, a place where immigrants began the process of becoming “Americans” while a constant stream of new arrivals reminded them of everything they had left behind in Europe.
In Hester Street, director Silver tells the story of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young wife who arrives, speaking only Yiddish, to discover that her husband has reinvented himself as a “Yankee,” complete with a sweatshop job, a brash new girlfriend, and a passion for all things American. Gitl has to reinvent herself, too, in a strange country, but she turns to a scholarly boarder who believes that the old and the new must coexist.
Produced independently when Silver found it impossible to get funding from a major studio for a project helmed by a woman, the film’s critique of mass culture made it relevant in 1974 and keeps it so today.
In English & Yiddish.
Cosponsored with the Jewish Studies Program.
Watch a trailer & get tickets here: https://cinema.cornell.edu/hester-street
