The Immigrant Experience: The Long Long Journey. 1972. USA. Directed by Joan Micklin Silver. DCP. 28 min.
Hester Street. 1975. USA. Directed by Joan Micklin Silver. Screenplay by Silver, based on a book by Abraham Cahan. With Steven Keats, Carol Kane, Doris Roberts. DCP. In English, Yiddish; English subtitles. 89 min.
Carol Kane, in one of her most memorable performances, is Gitl, an Eastern European Jewish woman who, with her child, joins her husband, Yankel, on New York’s Lower East Side in 1896, only to find that he has assimilated into American culture and begun a new life without them, prompting her to find her own way in a new country while hoping to preserve her identity. Based on Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto and inspired by immigration stories shared by her Russian father, Joan Micklin Silver’s first feature is a remarkably detailed portrait of Eastern European Jewish immigration. In The Immigrant Experience: The Long Long Journey, Silver films a young Polish boy and documents his family’s life experience in the early-20th-century United States.