In the first part of the twentieth century, the United States accepted millions of Jews from Russia, Poland, Germany and other Eastern and Central European countries. These immigrants first escaped the social changes and the growing pressure on their community in the 1900-1920, later they sought to survive the Holocaust and mass repressions associated with the establishment of Hitler’s regime in several European states. The present paper is intended to discuss the similarities and differences of Jewish experience in the United States as depicted in the films “Hester Street”, “We Were So Beloved” and relevant research work.
One of the most notable aspects in new-coming Jewry’s acculturation and adaptation in the United States, according to “We Were So Beloved”, is the strong guilt. In fact, in the 1930s, with the rise of totalitarian regimes, which were opposed to the Jewish population, this ethical group sought to safeguard themselves and their families from unfair “justice” and concentration camps. As a result, thousands of Jews fled Germany, Poland and Russia searching merely for a safer place where they would be tolerated, whereas millions of other Jews were condemned to staying in the specified countries and waiting for their sentence. For instance, the parents of Mr.Kirchheimer, the director of the film, managed to move to the United States when the boy was only five, and he recounts that as a child, he was not able to understand why his parents emotionally responded to each piece of news about European Jews and tried so hard to help their friends and relatives vanish from Europe to a less hostile place. In fact, he was grown up in a safe environment, where all military conflicts in Europe seemed a remote tragedy, to which he was not connected, whereas his parents were keeping in their minds the fact that their former neighbors and friends might have been slaughtered recently in death camps. In fact, the psychological and social guilt of American Jews is also portrayed in “Hester Street”, particularly through the characters of Bernstein, Jake and Girl. Bernstein, a former Torah student, is now supposed to work at a sweatshop in order to provide for himself, so he has little time for his education, whereas as a member of Jewish community in Europe, he had a dream of becoming a rabbi or teacher. Thus, after changing his lifestyle, Bernstein feels like a betrayer of his traditions. Similarly, Gitl, Jake’s wife, is not able to accept the values and patterns of American society, since she is extremely loyal to the traditional division of gender roles and the rules of proper behavior for women. As a result, she feels guilty for changing her apparel (hairstyle, dressing) and ashamed for allowing her husband Jake to change from an orthodox Jew to a true “Yankee”. Jake, in turn, feels emotional discomfort because of the arrival of his wife and son to the United States, as he now has a relationship with another woman, Mamie and feels it difficult to accept the fact that Girl and his son have become his burden. The idea of family disruption under the pressure of the necessity of fleeing the Nazi regime is well-described in Muchman’s book “Never to Be Forgotten”, which narrates about a young girl, who finds that her parents voluntarily separated from her in order to save her from death camps by organizing her adoption by a Catholic woman (Muchman,p. 62).
An important theme which can be found in both films and the book is professional and economic self-establishment in the United States. For instance, most respondents in “We Were So Beloved” admit they first did the least pleasant manual work at plants and factories and worked hard in order to give proper education to their children, they further set up small businesses and became self-employed citizens. In the United States, the newcomers from the Old World settled in tiny huts, even though they originally belonged to a middle class. For instance, Frankel remembers that he and his parents lost everything they had in Germany including their large home and savings, in the United States they needed to prove their competence again and become non-qualified manual workers and needed to cope with the pressure of the Jewish career traditions. Moreover, his parents were eager to help those people who left in Germany and give them a warm welcome , so Mr.Frankel also mentions that a number of other Jewish immigrants lived in their Washington Heights home. The problem of making ends meet in the first years of residence in the U.S. is also shown is “Hester Street ”: for instance, the first generation of Jewish Americans, both men and women, is depicted as factory workers. Moreover, Gitl, who comes to the U.S. in order to reunite the family, faces a problem of making choice: on the one hand, she is aware of the fact that Jewish women traditionally work as housekeepers; on the other, she meets a number of employed women of Jewish background in New York and feels she is supposed to adjust her traditional lifestyle to the current social conditions. By the end of the film, however, both Gitl and Jake become entrepreneurs, as the former sets up a small shop, whereas the latter created a dancing school. In Metzker’s “Bintel Brief”, it is noted that upon their arrival to the United States, Jewish immigrants needed to overcome poverty and live in dissatisfactory conditions (Isaac,p.13), whereas the book “About the B’nai Bagels”, one can found the positive results of their hard work which consists in bringing up well-educated and socially competent who become sports stars. Moreover, the latter book, similarly to “Hester Street” and “We Were So Beloved”, underlined the economic independence and contribution to the family budget which the woman can make by becoming a great leader of the store or baseball team (Konigsburg, p.100).
As one can conclude, both motion pictures and the book actually depict similar aspects of Jewish immigrant experience in America, in particular, their guilt for leaving their relatives and peers from the Old World and for violating their religious norms and values. Moreover, the works reflect the economic development of American Jewry and their own path to the American Dream.
Works cited
We Were So Beloved, a motion picture, dir. M. Kirchheimer.
Hester Street, a motion picture, dir, J.M. Silver.
Konigsburg, Elaine Lobl. About the B’nai Bagels. USA: Aladdin, 2008.
Isaac, Metzker. A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Eastern Europe Side to the Jewish Daily Forward. New York: Shoken Books, 1971.
Muchman, B. Never to be Forgotten: A Young Girl’s Holocaust Memoir. KTAV Publishing House, 1997.