We’re doing something a little different tonight. I’ll write an introduction and afterward of sorts, but the story was written by relatives who died before I was born.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lonely young homosexual in possession of a Netflix subscription 20 years ago, must be in want of Carol Kane films. In my early twenties, having not yet known the touch of a woman — let us pause for Crankenstein’s laughter — I did little but work, read (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, stage plays, shampoo bottles, anything), write (film criticism and fiction), and watch movies. Screenwriter by screenwriter, director by director, actor by actor, I methodically screened as many films as I could that were made by the artists I liked, while also reading as much about their work as possible.
With Carol Kane, this resulted in two very unique viewing experiences: The Mafu Cage (in the form of its earliest, most primitive DVD release), which is far too strange and disturbing to easily summarize in passing, and Hester Street (1975), Joan Micklin Silver’s brilliant feature-length directorial debut. I loved the latter so much, with its black and white cinematography and subtitled Yiddish dialogue and immigrant identity crises, that I promptly obtained an old yellowed copy of its source material, Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. It wasn’t a book many 21-year-olds, much less 21-year-old lesbians, were interested in circa 2004, which might explain some of the celibacy; I was probably one of two in the entire country to read it for fun that year, and, weirdly, shiksa Crankenstein subsequently dated us both.
As Gitl, an Eastern European (i.e., Jewish) immigrant whose bumpy assimilation will never satisfy her self-loathing husband Yankel, Kane gives an astonishingly touching performance — one of the best of the 1970s, in a film that looks and feels like something made 50 or 60 years prior. My mother’s family, like all immigrant families, had a lot in common with Gitl’s, but until today I hadn’t known they also lived on Hester Street during their years in New York. Here’s an excerpt from a short family narrative that I just received in the mail, with names changed to protect the innocent.
In the year of 1876, a man by the name of Yaakov Abramovitz was born in Kiev, Russia.* In the year of 1878, a woman named Rose Litvak was born in Lithuania. Rose had a sister, Sadie, and four brothers. Two brothers died during the war in Russia. Her surviving brothers were Moshe and Isadore. It is unknown whether Yaakov and Rose’s marriage was arranged. They had two children in Russia, a son and a daughter, that died of diphtheria.
In October, 1902, their son Isaac was born. Two years later, they moved to the United States. Their name was changed from Abramovitz to Cohen. They believed it was changed due to a misunderstanding by officials at Ellis Island.
While living on Hester Street in New York, Rose gave birth to David (1905), Sarah (1906), Esther (1907), Joseph (1909), Yetta (1910), and Nathan (1912).
In 1916, the Cohens moved to St. Louis and stayed with Rose’s sister, Sadie Rosenbaum, and Sadie’s husband Milton. Before leaving New York, Rose sent her kosher dishes ahead to Sadie for safekeeping. Because the Rosenbaums didn’t keep kosher, Rose’s dishes were mixed with fleishik and milkhik and were no longer kosher. Yaakov and Rose were too poor to buy new dishes and didn’t keep kosher after moving to St. Louis.
Yaakov and Rose were my great-great-grandparents, of course, and assimilation issues — a universal experience if ever there was one — abounded in their family. Fortunately, Yaakov was a kinder man than the fictional Yankel. But Rose struggled to find her identity as an American, and her children, who were too young to realize her constant pregnancies were part of the problem, sometimes resented her because of it.
I’d love to tie this all up with a joke, but there’s not enough time to hone my Catskills routine tonight. Since “Across 110th Street” is stuck in my head now and might also be stuck in yours, here’s the Bobby Womack classic on YouTube (and the movie, like Hester Street, is on Tubi). Now I’m off to sing “Pimps trying to catch a woman that’s weak” into my hairbrush while getting ready for bed, just as Rose and Yaakov surely envisioned when leaving everything behind for a life of freedom and opportunity in America.
* It was called Kiev, Russia in the past; today it’s known as Kyiv, Ukraine.