Hester Street: Living Between Worlds
Hester Street: Living Between Worlds

Summary/Abstract: In 1896 Abraham Cahan published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto – a novel about the Jewish experience of immigration to America. In 1975 Joan Micklin Silver turned the book into a movie. Hester Street opens with an emblematic sequence set in a dance school located on Lower East Side in New York: clumsy movements, emphatic gestures, exaggerated facial expressions. There is a large inscription on the wall: English spoken here. Underneath the same statement is written in Yiddish. It would be hard to find a better application of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”, because it is the language that has to mediate the experience between the old and the new, tradition and modernity, the habits shaped in the abandoned homeland with the opportunities offered by the New World. From this perspective Hester Street appears to be more than just another tale of crossing borders. The paper discusses the film as a profound and multilayered meditation on the “production of identity” as a fluid, subjective and incomplete process.

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