. . . observes recent Russian immigrant Gitl Podkovnik (Carol Kane) in 1896, when there was no need for 12-ounce bottled water here because the U.S. had not yet been "fracked," and all our earthquakes were "natural." I've watched hundreds of films released by the Edison Manufacturing Company in the 1890s and 1900s, which feature a wide cross-section of the same sort of Jewish characters that HESTER STREET tries to recreate from a distance of seven decades. While HESTER STREET writer\director Joan Micklin Silver produces a somewhat-romanticized feature aimed at the tiny "Jewish ROOTS" niche market, Thomas Alva Edison's very hands-on productions brought depictions of this era of the American Jewish Experience home to the U.S. gentile masses AS IT WAS HAPPENING IN REAL TIME! It's one of History's great tragedies that Mr. Edison passed away just as his anti-Semite Michigan camping buddies Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were chumming around with and influencing Germany's increasingly prominent Adolf Hitler. Had Tom been there to balance out Hank and Chuck's rabidly misanthropic viewpoints, it would have been less likely if not impossible to have The Holocaust.
Review of Hester Street
