Word: ghettoes
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...setting is a Montreal ghetto, around 1925. The protagonist is an extraordinarily appealing little boy named David (Jeffrey Lynas). Struggling for possession of his young mind are his father (Len Birman) and his grandfather (Yossi Yadin). The former is a hustler, determined to abandon traditional Jewish ways and invent his way upward (creaseless pants, expandable cuff links−so you can roll up your sleeves without unlinking them). The latter is a sweet-spirited, loving junk dealer, who is equally determined to imbue David with the belief that an Orthodox faith can still serve successfully as a guide to existence...
Familiar Stereotypes. Yet for all its affability, Lies is not a very effective work. The courtyard's population, for example, is a very predictable one. David's mother is long-suffering, the neighbors familiar stereotypes from a hundred warm-spirited recollections of ghetto life−a scholarly revolutionist, a troublemaking yenta, a feisty and good-spirited whore. The minute we meet them, we can call the turns they will eventually do, just as we know, almost from the film's first minute, that Grandfather will die before it ends...
...have to do is take their Harvard diploma and ask for it. And when they get told no, they still have their career, and their security, and the small reassurance that "things will get better as soon as the economy gets back on the upswing." Meanwhile back in the ghetto...
...article reports that "Hester Street's tomorrow, which has already begun today, is clearly Chinese-American." Joan Micklin Silver's film by the same name is set at the turn of the century, a time when the street was a major center of activity in New York's Jewish ghetto, and the men who shuffled down its sidewalks were mumbling Yiddish under their beards...
Purists might complain that Hester Street presents an inaccurate picture of New York Jewish ghettoes at the turn of the century. This is true, but immaterial. According to this film, no one lived in squalor, and the worst aspect of the sweatshops was an occasional snide comment from the boss. The photographer Jacob Riis, who depicted the terrible conditions of living in New York's Jewish ghetto at the turn of the century, would have been horrified by the distortion in this film. But rather than a scathing social portrait of the era, Silver has set out to create...