C (2:32)

Sure. Thank you. Well, I'm based in London, uk, so it's quite interesting, I think, that I picked a film which is so centered on New York, but I teach film studies. I'm completely freelance and I love doing that. I teach adults and I speak a lot to general audiences, introducing films, hosting filmmaker Q&As, and I'm film critic as well, a member of the London Film Critics Circle. Previously, alongside my PhD research, I worked in the media as well. So I really enjoy sort of rounded view of the industry and audiences and I see myself as somewhere in the middle, interpreting films and understanding how they have an effect on the audiences. And so that's what really led me to write the book, which is, as you've explained, about a young woman who comes to America really not knowing what to expect. The film starts off actually focusing on her husband Jake, who has already been in America for three years, which was a pretty common experience, that the man would go ahead and then work up enough money to bring over his family. So once she arrives, which is about 20 minutes into the film, we see the difference in lifestyles of someone who started to assimilate. Who's Jake? Her husband. And Gittel is a Yiddish name who is not so familiar with the world that she finds herself in. And the story is how she adjusts.

B (4:02)

That is a helpful overview of the kind of premise. And even just in that very simple introduction, there's so much tension you can sort of imagine is coming. But it is, in fact the point you mentioned in your introduction that I'd love to pick up on next. Which is why you, based on in London, chose this film to write a book about.

C (4:22)

I think it is testament to how impactful the film really is. It centres very much on Gittell Carol Kane's face and her movements. So it's quite specific to a place and time, but also quite a universal story of just a young woman finding their place in the world and trying to discover their voice and see if how much freedom of choice they might really want. If you're offered with the world of opportunity, which is America, what do you choose in order to stay true to yourself, but also to grow? So I think that just appealed to me as a story, but what also appealed to me was the fact that there hadn't been anything really significant written about the film? Well, there are chapters and analyses within wider conversations and it has been discussed here and there in the history of filmmaking, but really not as much as one would expect.

B (5:23)

Yeah, I found that really curious. Given the commercial and critical acclaim of the film, why do you think it hasn't received so much attention?

C (5:31)

I don't think there's one simple answer. I think it's been neglected in lots of different areas which has had a cumulative effect. It's because it's about Jewish people. I think it has been pigeonholed into Jewish studies. And Jewish studies tends to be more in the sort of cultural studies area or history area than film studies. So there hasn't been as much meeting of the different areas. And that said as well, film studies tends to be quite separate as well in academic circles. So I think the film is sort of assigned as being a Jewish film and wasn't then discussed with the depth of analysis that I think it really owes itself, that lends itself to. So it might be discussed in terms of thinking how it depicts a certain lifestyle, but it doesn't look at what camera angles have been used or what the performance is like and things like that. So it hasn't really been picked up much in film studies or in feminist studies, which tends to look at more political sides of or more overtly political filmmaking. And then once the film is sort of out of circulation or once it hasn't been brought up to the forefront of academic study, then the next round of analysts or interested audiences misses out. Because if it's not listed in the canon of great films in sort of a five to ten year period, then. Then the next looking back, don't find it. And if it's not in circulation in university libraries or in the video shop back in those days, then it will just be overlooked and then it just escalates. It's not to say that it wasn't in people's minds because as you said, it was a very popular film. So it's one of those films that's often remembered and with sort of nostalgia. Oh, I love that film. Yes, yes. I haven't seen it for ages. Lots of people remember it and talk about it fondly, but that's not quite the same as having maybe sort of entering the canon or as you said, the book's been published by Bloomsbury and it's part of the BFI Film Classics series. And I thought that was very important for me, that the film is recognized as a classic in that way rather than just a piece of sort of community nostalgia, which I think it was beginning to fall into. Often when I mention the film or the filmmaker, people say, oh, is that the pickle one? The film with the pickles? Because Joan Micklin Silver went on to make Crossing de Lancey, which is set in the same area but in the 1980s. And in that film there is the pickle guy. And I have to say, no, it's not the pickle guy, it's the other one. Because the film Hester street does sort of linger in people's minds, but over the course of time it tends to get a bit confused, a bit muddied. People remember that they liked it, but not quite exactly which film it was.

B (8:36)

That's really interesting to think about kind of the ways in which it is and isn't remembered. So thank you for giving us kind of that wider context of the study, if that makes sense. It does kind of lead me to ask the question of. When I read that section of the book, I kind of then was amazed that the book isn't like, I don't know, 700 pages long. Like it's actually quite readable. Because if it hasn't been analyzed before, I mean, to some extent that's a problem to solve, but also it's sort of an opportunity, but maybe too big of one. Like, how do you decide how to approach a topic when it has kind of such rich material but hasn't really been used before? Like, how did you make sense of where you wanted to go with it and what to focus on?

C (9:16)

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think with any research, especially academic research, you have to set your parameters and say this is being included and this is not being included. Well, there were three main strands that are relevant to me personally and the research which I felt I connected with, which was the Jewish feminist film. And those are three bits of me, and they're three bits of Joan Mickle and Silver and Hester street as well, and Gittel the character. So I took those strands as my sort of guiding lights. And what I was trying to do was to bring those three aspects together so that they weren't separated, that it was a holistic view of Jewish feminist film, rather than saying, here's the chapter on Jewishness, that chapter on feminism, or maybe not feminism, because Jicklin Silver wasn't an overtly political sort of member of a feminist movements in the 1970s. So it's a different perspective to what we might have today, say on feminism. And then my background in film studies. So I really felt like I was able to bring that close analysis, which is what I love doing. It's where my passion is of just looking at an image or a sequence and trying to work out how it has an effect on our eyes and minds and ears in a particular way. And then I was really constrained by time. So I had six months, six chapters, two weeks research, two weeks writing, and I'd already done a fair bit of research in order to do the proposal. So I knew where I was going with that. And as you said, it was very, very rich, deep history. So I sort of did deep dives into Russian history and also in the Jewish laws of head covering. And, you know, I could have gone on and on, but I had to just take what I needed and distill it into a sentence or two and then might move on and earmark that for future research. But it was very interesting and that kept me going. I hope it feels quite pacey to read because I had to settle on something and then move on to the next topic and tie it together as well.

B (11:27)

Yeah, that's definitely a big kind of behind the scenes challenge of this. And that's something I always find really interesting. Getting to interview the authors after reading the book is kind of getting us peek behind the curtain, I suppose, to understand kind of how this all came together. So thank you for telling us a bit about that process for the book. And it's actually on that theme I'd like to discuss that process for the film because you talk about in the book not just the end result, but also the process of getting there. And I was really fascinated to read that this film was considered quite risky to make. So can you outline for us kind of why this was seen as sort of a film that wasn't inevitably going to happen?

C (12:04)

Yes, well, firstly, it was a debut feature film. And I think that's difficult for any filmmaker in any time really to say to somebody, trust in me, give me your money, I'll get you a return. I can do this. So first of all, it's just being a debut feature filmmaker. She was already 40 years old with three kids and had a career making short films and educational films, many of which were on television. So it was a bit of a leap to move into feature filmmaking. But she saw her male contemporaries do that. So she was very experienced and talented and successful in what she did. And she saw her friends and colleagues make that step onwards. And she didn't. And she was told outwardly, openly women directors are too risky. So that was a Specific setback. But there were also elements of the film which were not. Sure Fire Hit maker. So it being in black and white. There were, as I mentioned in the book, there were other films in black and white at the time. It wasn't actually until the 1960s that American film were predominantly in color. So it wasn't a. It was quite a slow process. And that in itself wasn't a reason for the film not to have been trusted. A woman protagonist. There wasn't much sex and violence. This is the era of new Hollywood. There were a lot of sort of graphic depictions of sex and violence on screen which were lapped up by audiences who were very keen to see something different and to have a break from the old Hollywood. And it was more evocative of European cinemas, more daring, more exciting. But Hester Street's just really not like that. And also just the fact that it was a Jewish story, a lot of it was in Yiddish. That was. That was probably the one of the biggest risks was doing something in subtitled or broken English. But that said, there was also a big audience watching French films, Italian films at the time. So it's. It wasn't that American audiences weren't open to these elements individually, but it was the combination of things which should have made it quite an odd film, really.

B (14:30)

Yeah, that's definitely interesting to understand kind of the different pieces there and make sense why it was so risky. Because it wasn't just one aspect that was kind of pushing the boundaries. There were multiple pieces to, however, became a film. So what was the process of kind of getting from that point of it being a bit of a risk, a bit of kind of out there to actually happening?

C (14:52)

Well, from what I understand, Joan Mickle and Silva said, well, this is such a risk that I might as well choose all of these risky elements. There was no compromise on her part, really. It wasn't like, well, if I just change it to all English or I change it to color, then it was, if I'm going to make this, I might as well go all out and just make the film that I want to make. And she chose a story that honoured her parents experiences because they had been immigrants as well. And through all this rejection, she found it very, very hard to keep the motivation going. But her husband saw how hard it was and he said, well, why don't I, or we try and raise the money ourselves. And he was a property developer, so not involved in the movie industry at all. But he asked a few of his business contacts if they would put a bit of money in and hopefully they would get a return on their investment. And they trusted him because he'd done well in business. And also they would have known that she was a successful and competent filmmaker. Not at that stage, a feature filmmaker, but it wasn't that. She was a complete unknown and she wasn't. It wasn't somebody's pet project. It was really a feature film that she'd worked very hard on, even in the early stages. So they raised a bit of money. It was initially $350,000, and the price increased a little bit, as film productions usually do as it went on. But they did raise it, and that's how it happened. And they set up an independent production company which ended up also distributing the film, because even once it was made, nobody wanted to distribute it.

B (16:30)

Wow. That's a very kind of trick, convoluted process, I suppose, of getting it out there. But of course, it did get out there. And I'm wondering about that aspect of kind of. She made the film she wanted to make. Can we talk more a bit about kind of the plot and the story? You talk in the book that it was based on a novella, but it wasn't sort of a direct. Everything in the novella is exactly the same in the film. So what were some of the key changes she made in terms of plot?

C (16:57)

Well, first or. The main aspect is really shifting the emphasis away from Jake and towards Gittel, the wife. And I think overall, the characters are a bit more sympathetic in the film. All of the characters. It's quite a hard novella to read. It's great fun and it's beautifully written, but it's a book that really engages the reader in a process of understanding and translation, because things are written phonetically and you sort of have to mouth the words as you read them to try and decode what might be said. So it's very cleverly written, but it's a very different process to how it comes across in the film. Gittel, in the book is a small, dark, hysteric woman, doesn't have particular sort of inner strength that's conveyed. And Jake is really someone who just can't get anything right. And there's an element of that in the film, but they sort of come alive in a more rounded way. Perhaps it's. It's less comedic. I think the film is less comedic. I'm going to try not to give any spoilers and tell people what happens in the end.

B (18:15)

Yeah, no, that. That's fair enough.

A (18:17)

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C (19:28)

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B (19:35)

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C (19:44)

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C (19:52)

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B (20:58)

I wonder if we can talk also a bit about the kind of visual aspects of the film. You mentioned that being a really key part of your analysis to analyze it sort of as a film. So I've picked out some aspects of it that I wonder if you can tell us about. One being, I think, a really interesting sort of contrast. Like there's many ways in which that images are really quite familiar. I mean, obviously now, but even in the 70s, they would have been familiar images of Manhattan.

A (21:26)

Right.

B (21:26)

We've got Central park, we've got Ellis island, we've got the Lower east side. Those are well known visual sort of tropes in a way. But the film is also a lot about foreignness and liminality and what is it like to move between cultures and places. But then it's not like showing kind of the old country and the new country, like it's showing visually known places. So can you talk about kind of how the film conveys those ideas while also showing things that people would know?

C (21:56)

Yes. Well, I think it really avoids cliches. In lots of Hollywood films that tell the story of arriving in America, you will see the Statue of Liberty. Well, there's no Statue of Liberty in Hester Street. You see the insides of buildings. And similarly, you don't see the journey. You don't see anybody getting on a. A boat or train or actually making those arrivals. You see everybody and everything as they are there. And then so they carry their histories or their journeys within them. And what you're seeing is really psychological journeys and internal journeys. So you see internal spaces. And that's partly because of budget. So they didn't have the freedom to move around the city very much or take very wide shots that would involve them closing down the streets for a day. So everything had to be made quite small and inside and in controllable areas. And that was sort of an accidental constraint. It wasn't intentional, but it led to this feeling of claustrophobia and smallness. And when they go to Central park, you don't see them get on the train to Central Park. They just say, we had to take the train to get here. And you don't really know where it is. It could be anywhere in the countryside, but there's there's only one place it really could be as Central park, which actually, by the 1970s, was sort of falling to rack and ruin a little bit. And there was a big investment drive to make it more usable park. So it sort of made, perhaps rang a bell with people to think, oh, look how our city's changed. Audiences who would have been watching it then, this idea of Central park as a city oasis rather than just a sort of slightly grimy bit of Manhattan. Yeah. One of my deep dives in the research was looking at the history of Central park, which is really fascinating. And I spent probably too long looking at how and when the climbing frames were updated. But it's that kind of color, I think, which helped me understand the different points in time that Joan Micklin Silver was able to represent through the film. You've got 1896 when it's set, you've got the 1970s. And also our view now when we're looking back at this sort of history of the city. So Ellis island isn't specifically named and there's no caption saying, like, we are now on Ellis island, or it's just evoked. That was filmed in a different building as well, and the Lower east side of Manhattan. I think the Market street was really very well represented. Inspired by photographs that the production team would have seen that had been taken around the 1890s, which, interestingly, were thought of as social documentaries. So photographers would go and show how those people lived. And these photographs were reproduced and were quite familiar to audiences. By the 1960s and 1970s, they were often printed very large, reproduce very large, and put on the walls of diners and things like that to evoke this bygone era and maybe to try and explain a thread between the old times and the now. The now being the 1970s, when that old way of life was really very much in the past and people had moved out of the area.

B (25:19)

That's really interesting, especially, as you said, the three times there when it's set, when it was filmed and what we're seeing now to kind of have all of that conveyed, especially given what you were saying earlier about the difficult difficulties of making this film, kind of makes it even more impressive.

C (25:33)

Thanks. Yeah. A note about making the film, about the production, that it was very. It is very common for independent productions to take a little bit of money from here and from there. Today, people will ask for different grants. £1,000, £2,000, £10,000 here and there and everywhere. So it's very different to the studio system, but in terms of independent filmmaking. It's not particularly unusual, but maybe today you would hope that somebody with as much experience under their belt as Joe McClin Silver wouldn't find it as hard to be a woman trying to make that jump. But who knows?

B (26:10)

You mentioned language as being a unique aspect of the film, but another piece of it that seemed really important was accent. So can we talk about that aspect, too?

C (26:21)

Yes. I think the accent, the spoken accent, what we normally, in normal speech, we think of as accent is very evident. All the actors who. They didn't. Most of them didn't speak Yiddish. And they had to learn Yiddish for their roles and also learn the accents. So they had a dialect coach. And there isn't just one Yiddish accent. Yiddish is a language that was spoken throughout Europe, mostly northern Europe, and each country would have a different Yiddish accent. So Mamie, one of the characters, was born in Poland, so she has a. Well, what they called then Poland. So all the borders today are different. So what was called Russia is now the Russian. What is Russia? They call Russia, but it's actually the Russian Empire. So they could have been from very different parts of that area in the film. So they have different accents between Mamie and the other characters. But also Yiddish was spoken as far as Romania. So in reality, there's no one Yiddish accent. So they all have slight different tinges, and that was very important. So they were all trying to learn English, and they would all make different sort of. I wouldn't call them mistakes, colorizations of their English. And that's very clear in Jekyll, the book. Because additionally, Jake has a lisp in the book. So when you're trying to decipher what he's saying through the phonetic spellings, that becomes an extra complication which tells us how difficult this idea of life, translation, or living in a new country with a new language, how that is a constant. I wouldn't necessarily say struggle, but it's a constant element or reminder of difference. And then within the area of film studies, there's this. I talk about quite a lot in the film, this idea of accented cinema, which is a diasporic cinema. So a cinema which comes out of a filmmakers or producer's experience of living in a diaspora, not necessarily of a Jewish community, but of any community where an accented cinema arises that has traces of different cultures. And this was very present in Hester street because there's also Yiddish cinema, which was huge in the 1920s, which is mostly black and white. So there's visual accent. So there's elements of influence, which we can see in the visual style of Hester street, which can be understood as an accent. And there's also accented objects, items and props and costumes and mannerisms and habits, rituals, which are very evident in Hester Street. They're not necessarily consciously observed as accented in the same way that language might be, but it's something that feeds into our understanding of what we're watching or colorization. And I think those are elements which make people quite fond of the film because it has a very rich tone to it, and that's something which has enabled it to stick in people's memories and really charm audiences.

B (29:40)

I think that's a really lovely aspect of it to discuss. I would guess as well that another thing that sticks in people's minds, because this is such a kind of iconic thing in many films, is the sort of makeover scene. Right. That's often something people come back to. But I want to talk about this makeover scene in particular, because you discuss in the book how it is the makeover scene you expect, but it's also really not in some interesting ways. So what's going on here?

C (30:09)

Well, it is a bit of a rite of passage in any sort of romantic comedy that the plain girl gets a makeover. And Hester street, in some ways is a romantic comedy, and in other ways it's not. I'm quite conscious that when I talk about the film, it seems quite serious and sort of stressful, but actually the very light moments, and it's quite joyful to watch in some ways. So Gittel really wants her husband to find her attractive. She's not that interested in being modern or cool or sexy in general. She just wants it to be for her husband, which in Jewish law is completely appropriate, that you're meant to look nice for your partner. Men and women are meant to. That's not just a woman's thing. And she has all these her neighbors saying, like, you need to just get. Get rid of your outfit, you need to change your hair, you need to look good. And you can still be religious and observant and pious and still look better. Because she doesn't have many clothes, she's just come off the boat from Russia, where this idea of fashion in her old world is just not part of her worldview at all. But she's come to America where almost all of the working characters work in the ghost garment trade making clothes. So even though they didn't have much money, they were able to add frills or dress their hats or make small adjustments to look and feel more fashionable and American in ways which did not go against religious observance strictures. And Guitto has to work out how much she can change and still stay within the rules. So in the makeover scene, her neighbour offers her some things to wear and Gittel doesn't completely strip off and she doesn't completely sort of let her hair down. The way that it's filmed is not eroticized. And Gittel ends up just laughing at herself in the mirror, possibly because she's having fun, but also because I think she sees the ridiculous of it. She's wearing a wig with a hat on top of. With feathers. And when she takes off the corset that she tries on, she's just so happy. And she's really trying to work out what she's comfortable in. Comfortable in lots of different ways, lots of different meanings of the term. And also she wants her husband to find her attractive. And I don't want to give too much away of the plot, but it has a different effect, which is also an effect which is seen in. In other stories and other narratives not only centered on women. I was thinking actually about Midsummer Night's Dream, when there's a. There's a costume change and often there's a comedy arises from the unexpected consequence of changing the way you look. It changes how other people see you as well. And her makeover doesn't lead to an immediate change. It's one of the few makeovers in films when somebody has a makeover, looks quite different and then the next scene they've gone back to their old ways. And I think that's quite telling. It shows how Gittel's strength of character, really.

B (33:33)

Yeah. It's a really interesting scene. I can imagine kind of how much it would have worked with audience expectations, but also kind of not just repeated the same sort of tropes.

C (33:42)

The way it filmed is. Does pick up on tropes of having the mirrors. There's lots of mirrors involved. This idea of a makeover being a moment of self reflection and an opportunity for us as viewers to think about how the character looks within their own world. It's not. We're not just looking at the character and they don't know that we're there because that's generally how films work. But once characters start looking in the mirror, you. It's a reflexive device on lots of different levels. And there's almost always a mirror in a makeover scene and there's almost always a busybody friend or neighbour or relative who's poking around on the woman's body, trying to make it more socially acceptable.

B (34:24)

And those are definitely here there. Thinking then, more about the viewers. We've mentioned the fact that the film was popular and critically acclaimed. Can you tell us more about the film's reception, given the kind of struggles to get it produced? Was it it a surprise? What was it like when it came out in the mid-70s?

C (34:43)

Yeah, well, they managed to get it to the Cannes Festival and it was picked up for four European territories, but nobody in America, in the UK was particularly keen on investing in its distribution. And then it became a bit of a sleeper hit, sort of, I would say a quick sleeper hit, because within a few months it had made it to New York and la and then sort of it spread. It really became very popular and it ran and ran. So through the research, if it opened in October, I was finding adverts for it going into January saying, come and see us through the holiday season. And Hester Street's still showing. It's still showing. It's still showing. So there were months. And this suggests that maybe people were going to see it more than once as well, across America. And it made $5 million at the box office, so it was made for less than half. So that really is a huge success. It did defy the naysayers, I would say. People in the industry were surprised that a woman filmmaker would come out with a successful film that had wide appeal. And just that all the oddities that we talked about before add to its charm. And you talk about expectations. Well, I think that Raphael, Joan McClinsilver's husband, I don't think he was all that surprised because he was the one who said, no, we can get more than this. You know, when people suggested, well, they could show it in the community center, he said, well, okay, but. And the cinema and New York and la. He was determined that it was going to get a much wider release and that it could appeal to the general public. Joan McClint Silver, similarly, I think she hoped and suspected that it could be a good film. She had faith in her own abilities, I think, I hope. And. And the people working on it were really very, very talented. And they got advice from John Cassavetes, another filmmaker. They got some superior PR people. They found somebody or they were approached by somebody who said, you know, we can try and get it on the desks for the right people for the Academy Awards. So I think a lot of care was taken to get it to be seen by as many people as possible. And there was an appetite for independent cinema, or at least not mainstream Hollywood cinema. So I think once it was out there, it was, it was. There was an audience that was open to seeing a film like that and.

B (37:24)

Clearly an audience that's open to continuing to see the film. Is there anything further we want to discuss about why the film has remained so popular?

C (37:32)

It has remained popular, I would say probably more in the United States than here. Through my research when I was. It's fantastic to be able to look at online newspapers online from. For the last hundred and whatever years. When you search Hester street often it comes up in the listings for the late night TV slots. I think in the UK they always used to be through the 80s and 90s, there were always Westerns on at 2 in the morning. You could always find some sort of random film and it seems that Hester street often was given that slot. So it has been shown periodically over the years, but it hasn't been really very well kept in distribution and that means that audiences sort of are much less aware of it. And it has been restored. So from around the year 2000, 20, 20 ton Silver's films were being restored, so digitally restored and new prints put out and digital prints made available. So there's obviously an interest in her films and in Hester street and in making it available to more people. But there was a period of time when it was a film that was sort of remembered more than. More than seen. And that's, that's actually seen in a lot of the, a lot of the research that I read, sort of minus maybe inaccuracies or spelling, misspelling people's names and things like that. That makes me think, well, did. When did they actually see the film? Or how are they, how are they writing this if. If they're not? I don't have the DVD right in front of them. So it did make me wonder, it made me wonder how, how widespread it's been.

B (39:23)

That is an interesting twist to examining the existing work that was out there before, of course, your book. If I can ask what you might be working on next now that this project is done and the book is out in the world. Anything on your desk?

C (39:36)

Well, I'm trying to, obviously trying to promote the book, but I'm also trying to promote the film. So it has been re released by Park Circus, the film distributors, which I'm delighted about, and we're trying to get it in as many cinemas as possible. We've had some very successful screenings already, but I think there's a lot more that can be done and I'm looking forward to that. I think there is certainly more work to be done on Joan McranSilva's life and works, so watch this space for that. And I do have another idea for the BFI film classics, but it's in very, very early stages. But I'm enjoying talking to people about Hester street and I've got some more teaching projects as well, so that's what I'm working on.

B (40:24)

You've been plenty busy then.

C (40:26)

Yes, I do like doing a few different things. I really enjoy engaging with audiences, lecturing as but I did enjoy writing the book, so hopefully there's another one or two coming out of that.

B (40:41)

Well, we shall see. And of course, for any listeners who want to learn more about the film, the book is titled Hester street, as is of course the film and the book was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Julia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

C (40:55)

Thank you so much, Miranda.