32 | JANUARY 21 • 2021

A

fter decades making movies star-
ring characters — often women
— bristling against social strictures
and navigating romance in ways that tended
to surprise even themselves, Jewish film-
maker Joan Micklin Silver has died at 85.
Silver, who died Dec. 31, 2020, was best-
known for 1988’s Crossing Delancey, a sur-
prise hit. The film finds Isabelle Grossman
(Amy Irving), a 30-something Manhattan
bookseller, navigating romance amid the
pressures of not just various men — as is
typical — but the influence of the older
Jewish women she grew up with, who prove
eager to find a match for her. These forces
clash against Grossman’s own feminist-in-
formed expectations of herself, of how she
should find love and her desire to see herself
as an independent person.
In Delancey, as in 1975’s Hester Street,
which was set in a close-knit Polish-Jewish
enclave (many potential distributors dis-
missed it as “too ethnic,
” leading her to
self-finance), Silver — herself the daughter

of Russian-Jewish immigrants, though she
grew up in Omaha, Nebraska — showed
the compromises, frustrations and tensions
common to New York Jewish life.
Jewish neighborhoods in each film are
what they so often really are: symbolic spac-
es rich in sometimes associations with iden-
tity, heritage, class and culture. Silver’s work
tended to focus on romantic aspirations and
struggles between characters who are caught
between romance and independence, tradi-
tion and contemporaneity, and often Jewish
and American identity.
Though she worked on a small scale,
Silver had an accomplished eye for casting
and directing actors, a broad grasp of social
reality, and a sharp eye for details of spaces
ranging from newsrooms to publishing par-
ties and Jewish weddings.
And there are many sweetly realized,
quite disarming details across her work
through which Silver showed a grounded,
firsthand understanding of Jewish identity.
In Delancey, it’s Irving’s dense halo of curls,

the tables overflowing with Jewish cuisine, a
friend’s fainting spell at a bris and the warm
depiction of Grossman’s bubbie by Reizl
Bozyk (previously a Yiddish theater star),
which draws out generational shifts over
time in Jewish-American life.
In Hester, flashpoints between traditional
norms and assimilation are more point-
ed and dramatic — as when, at a picnic,
Jake (Steven Keats) demands of his more
reserved, recently arrived wife (Carol Kane):
“
Am I a Jew or a gentile? Just by what you
see.
” Anxious to pass freely as a white gen-
tile, he clearly wishes for her to say the latter.
Though Hester’s scope is modest, it speaks
— like Delancey — to the struggles of many
in finding the best route among an over-
whelming many in approaching diasporic
existence and the complex ways personal
aspiration often grates against social mores.
(Both films are available for VOD rental on
iTunes. Hester is also available on streaming
service Fandor.)
While Silver distinguished herself as a
great director of actors early on (Carol Kane
netted a Best Actress Oscar nomination for
Hester Street), and she collaborated with
many big names (Gena Rowlands, Sissy
Spacek, Rita Wilson), she struggled through-
out her career to secure funding for projects,
a difficulty attributable to persistent indus-
trial bias against women creators. In light
of this, her body of work — populated by
characters whose aspirations and self-con-
ceptions seem at odds with the lives they’ve
managed to build and the expectations of
those around them — seems all the more
impressive.

GEORGE ELKIND CONTRIBUTING WRITER

JEWISH WOMEN’S ARCHIVE

ARTS&LIFE
FILM

Joan Micklin Silver
Remembered

Joan Micklin Silver

with Amy Irving in

Crossing Delancey

(1988).

Filmmaker portrayed the romantic and
cultural struggles of Jewish women.

IMDB

Joan Micklin Silver

couldn’t interest

a Hollywood stu-

dio in doing a film

about early Eastern

European immigrants

to New York, which

would incorporate

some Yiddish. So she

wrote, directed and

co-produced Hester

Street (1975) herself.