Between a Heartache and a Laugh: Two Recent Films on Immigration

BETWEEN A HEARTACHE AND A LAUGH: TWO RECENT FILMS ON IMMIGRATION By ROBERT F. HOROWITZ In 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer revived historical interest in immigration, assimilation, and ethnic studies with their book Beyond the Melting Pot. Since then historians, sociologists, and political scientists including Rudolph J. Vecoli, Oscar Handlin, Leonard Dinnerstein, Phillip Taylor, Michael Parenti, Andrew Greeley, Richard Gambino, and Michael Novak, have published a profusion of books and articles on immigration and ethnicity. Almost simultaneously with the Moynihan and Glazer study, Elia Kazan's film America, America appeared. The motion picture industry, like the academy, quickly gauged the upsurge in public interest in immigration and released a number of films on ethnic groups. Among the more well known ones with Martin Ritt' s The Molly Maguires (Irish-American) , Arthur Hi 11 er' s Popi (Puerto Ri canAmericans ), Jan TroelTs The Emmigrants and The New Land (Swedish immigrants ), Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Italian-Americans). Last year attention shifted to immigrant and second-generation Jews with the release of Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street, and Jan Kadar's Lies My Father Told Me. Although both efforts are flawed in artistic development, and are sometimes lacking in realistic historical perspective, they are of value to professors teaching courses on immigration or ethnicity. Hester Street is a humorous, ironic tale about the traumas of assimilation among first-generation, east European Jewish immigrants living on the lower East Side of New York City in 1896. The movie was adapted from the Jewish -Ameri can journalist Abraham Cahan's anecdotal and bittersweet novella, Yekl . While Silver obviously had great affection for her Robert F. Honowttz teaches Hlstony at the Camden campus ofa Rutgers University. This article nepnesents his second contribution to Film S Hlstony. 73 subject matter, she at times allowed her warmth of feeling to spill over into stereotyped sentimentality. The film centers on Giti (Carol Kane), who comes to America with her little boy to join her husband Jake (Steven Keats), who has been in New York for three years. He is a handsome, boisterous, and rakish tailor in a sweatshop, who is well on his way to being Americanized, and who has fallen in love with a beautiful, partially assimilated immigrant girl, Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh). Jakes tries to reacquaint himself with his wife, but in his desperation to be a "real American fella," he quickly discovers that everything about Giti --her Yiddish speech mannerisms, her dress, her refusal to remove her perukes (Orthodox wig)--repells him, and reminds him of all the aspects of the old country which he has tried to forget. Giti, Jake, and their son move into a lower East Side tenement. A gentle and scholarly former rabbinical student named Bernstein (Mel Howard) boards in with them. Giti tries to adapt to her new environment, but her pace of adjustment is too slow to suit Jake. Bernstein, who is constantly being teased by Jake for wasting his time studying the Talmud and for being a "greenhorn," sympathizes with Gitl's agony. The unhappy couple have a series of hilarious, but nonetheless bitter quarrels. Unable to tolerate the situation, Jake, with the aid of the money Mamie has saved during her seven years in New York, gives Giti a cash settlement to get her to agree to a divorce. Then in an ironic turnabout, Giti, who has slowly developed into a woman of strength and maturity, prepares to establish a new life by marrying Bernstein and setting up a grocery store with Mamie's money. In a number of ways Hester Street manages to convey the essence of the Jewish immigrant experience. The conflict which tears at Jake and Mamie is the classic desire to stop being a greenhorn (oysgrinen zikh) and to become American. It is the hope of finding a place in a society completely different from the tradition-oriented communities of Eastern Europe. Historian Oscar Handlin has described immigration as a process of "alienation and its consequences." The immigrants lived in a state of turmoil because they were so totally "uprooted."1 Gitl's initial pious, passive bewilderment at being...