HESTER STREET
4:10
Sunday, February 19
(1974, Joan Micklin Silver) 1896 New York, and Steven Keats’ Yankel transforms himself into the all-American, beardless “Jake," acquiring a home-grown girlfriend along the way, and then his sheitel-wearing greenhorn wife Carol Kane (in Oscar-nominated performance) shows up on his doorstep, straight from the shtetl … and cultures collide, even as Doris Roberts offers salty advice, and non-pro Mel Howard timidly yearns from the sidelines. Despite its shoestring budget, a strikingly authentic look at late 19th century Lower East Side life, based on Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan, patriarch of the Jewish Daily Forward.
In Yiddish and English. 35mm print courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive. Approx. 92 mins.
An audience Q&A with director Joan Micklin Silver will follow the screening.
Reviews
“CAROL KANE’S FINEST HOUR ON THE BIG SCREEN.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out
“Beyond all the details there is the magnificent performance of Carol Kane as Gitl…by the end of the picture she is a triumphant bonfire.”
– The New York Times
“Joan Micklin Silver boasts one of the best filmographies of any American director of the Seventies…[Hester Street] re-creates, with low-budget ingenuity, the nineteenth-century Jewish Lower East Side and deftly conceals a modern fantasy of liberation under a welter of social detail and a touching emotional restraint.”
– Dan Sallitt, The Village Voice