The great American melting pot shows a low profile in Hester Street. The time-honoured themes—progress, assimilation, education—are deployed with taste, discretion and, above all, humour. This is Joan Micklin Silver's first film, made in black-and-white, with a self-effacing camera, not a zoom, hardly a close-up. It is a quasi-documentary style which allows her actors to slip with ease from English to subtitled Yiddish and exploit the comic vein with a minimum of fuss in such devastating aphorisms as Mrs. Kavarsky's "You can't piss up my back and make me think it's rain". The ironic symmetries of the fable and the comedy of the situations make the film thoroughly entertaining and belie any ethnographic intent. Yet Hester Street is a document in another sense. The portrait of an emerging community is shown as much through objects as through characters…. [Because] Hester Street is filmed without foreground or...