When my mother made her first feature film, Hester Street, I was thirteen. The film was a family DIY affair. My mother wrote and directed it; my father produced and distributed it. My two sisters and I were present at any number of dinner table conversations about the challenges of making an independent film on a tiny budget, one that required a wholesale recreation of a Lower East Side neighborhood at the turn of the last century. We learned what limited partnership financing was, we heard about the perils of trying to make a non-union film.
At one point, my father was taken for “a ride” by a representative for the Teamsters, after which Teamsters drove the film trucks. A gun on the floor of the sedan might have been involved. We heard the stories about how they could only afford one horse for the street scenes.
My parents figured out that if they painted one side of a chestnut mare white, they could create the illusion of two animals depending on which direction the horse moved across the screen. My mother never used the words “art” or “artist” to describe her work or herself, and I grew up with the sense that she was a craftsperson solving a set of complicated problems.
On opening night, the five of us walked over to the Plaza Theater where the film was showing. I can still remember what it felt like when we arrived to see a line outside the movie theater that wrapped around the corner and extended down the block. I was swept up in my parents’ pride and delight; they had, against all odds, pulled it off.
Our family ducked into the movie theater and stood at the back for a few minutes to watch the beginning of the film. I’d already seen it. I thought it was a good story. I liked Carol Kane’s young wife who finally had the bravery to choose her life. The busybody neighbor was hilarious. The soft good looks of the sweet and kind Talmudic scholar that Kane’s character falls for appealed to my adolescent heart.
I was not sophisticated in the ways of art making and had no idea that what was on screen was the sum of choices my mother had made, and that these choices had to do with something more elusive, and much more personal than whether one horse could stand in for two. It would be years before I understood how her work would reveal her to me in ways that my experience of her did not.
She was born in Nebraska, a child of the Depression. She possessed, to some extent, the stereotypical attributes of those two identifiers: an emotional and practical thrift. She greeted most problems with a Midwestern no-nonsense, knuckle down and get on with it grit. Even when she and my father had created a comfortable life for us, she’d put gaffer’s tape on a ruinously split handle of a breadknife to give it another decade.
A family joke had it that my mother never told stories of her past but reveled in the stories of my father’s childhood. It was as if she had co-opted his memories, happy to jettison, or at least, not contemplate, her own.
Here’s what I knew: Her mother and father were born in Russia and brought to America as children. They met, married and established a home in Omaha. Her mother was a homemaker; her father helped run a family-owned lumberyard. My mother was a bright little girl.
At school, she was routinely sent out of the classroom to read in the hallway because she was more advanced than the other students. Once, on a dare, she walked over a ravine on a narrow plank—a particularly startling detail, as we knew her to be a physically fearful adult.
I knew this, too: Her beloved father died when she was seventeen. He was her source of intellectual inspiration, and during the many years he was ill, she would sit by his bedside, and they would discuss books. After he died, her mother sent her to see a psychiatrist to discuss the loss—a surprisingly forward-thinking idea for the time.
When the doctor asked my mother how she was doing, she told him that she was fine. That was the end of that. She never went to a therapist again in her lifetime. That is the sum of what I know: a smart girl reading books in a hallway, a moment of uncharacteristic daring, and a great loss.
As a mother, she was intellectually alive. Recognizing my early interest in movies, she made me her film buddy, and together, we spent many hours sitting in the darkened Thalia, The Regency, The Quad, watching films like The Bicycle Thief, Grand Illusion, The Apu Trilogy, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
This was the seventies, and we’d sit in the smoking section where she’d light one Kool after another, never taking her eyes from the screen. She would occasionally reach into her purse mid-way through a film, take out her lipstick, and re-do her lips in the signature orange shade from which she never varied. I found this embarrassing but also comforting. She was herself no matter where she was, even in the dark, absorbed in the films she loved.
My mother included me in her work life. At ages fourteen or fifteen, I didn’t think it was strange to be asked to read and give my opinion about a script she was working on. In those pre-computer days, she had me type up revised pages, sometimes based on feedback I’d given.
Once a script was finalized, it was often my job to take the train to pick up boxes of copied and bound scripts. Watching a rough-cut of one of her films was not simply a treat, but a requirement. And so was the long discussion afterwards when my mother grilled me for my opinions. She made me feel that my ideas mattered. She took me seriously.