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Director-Writer Joan Silver, who used to produce educational shorts and is making her feature debut, has a palpable affection for her characters and a passion for period detail. She has made excellent use of limited resources, kept much of the dialogue in Yiddish (translated in subtitles) and evoked a persuasive sense of the past. Indeed, Silver has little trouble with her "little movie's" practical problems. It is quite another kind of challenge that confounds her.
The script, adapted from a period novel called Yekl by Abraham Cahan, concerns a small group of transplanted Jews painfully adjusting to the promised city. Yekl (Steven Keats) now calls himself Jake, works in a sweatshop and courts Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh, an actress of spirited sensuality). He takes in a boarder, a subdued former Yeshiva student named Bernstein (Mel Howard), and prepares for the coming of his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and infant son from the old country. Jake is not exhilarated by their arrival. They remind him of an older life now past; more important, he cannot break Mamie's erotic spell.
It is in Jake's story that the trials and compromises of assimilation are most easily perceived. But Writer-Director Silver gives as much attention to Bernstein and Gitl, even to Mamie, and so loses her central conflict. Most crucially, she is unable to resolve the basic emotional dilemma of Jake's confusion. It cannot simply be the new country and Jake's urgency to be part of it that turns him away from his wife and from tradition. Yet that is all the motivation Silver supplies him. It is just this short sightedness,this emotional skimpiness, that makes Hester Street a truly "little movie." It is not a matter of size, really, but of depth.