To broaden their experience of the city even more, I showed a film that showed some folkways, even though it might not be classified as a documentary. A film the students really enjoyed was the 1976 film, Hester Street, based on a novella by Abraham Cahan, the illustrious founder of New York’s Yiddish newspaper. The film, now hard to get, and bought for me by a student, tells the story of Jake, an East European immigrant who comes to New York on his own, leaving wife and little son behind. He manages, superficially, to adapt to his new setting, but picks up the worst of its habits. He succumbs to the allurements of another immigrant, a stylish but conniving woman, and thinks he’s on his way to being a “real American.” An unexpected family crisis brings his wife and son to the New World, and the movie takes on a bitter turn, as man and wife no longer recognize each other and disapprove of each other’s ways. The story has an ironic ending which supports the notion that the New World is tolerant of folkways, and no one needs to give up his/her identity in order to be a “real American.” Another film they enjoyed is a documentary by Jonathan Berman called The Shvitz (1993) about Russian steam baths. More recently I was able to add a new film to my roster, The Bungalows of Rockaway (2008) about a now obsolete beach community in a part of Brooklyn most of the students know. I devised simple questions about the films and used these questions as the basis of an exam. My intention was to test whether the students had absorbed some of the concepts of folklore which I had introduced at the beginning of the course, and I learned that on the whole they had done so quite well. Since most of the students balked at leaving their known turf to explore others, I always found some place for them to visit, and sent them off with questions that they had answer in writing. One year I sent them to Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood that is home to a large Indian as well as Central American community, another time I sent them to Ridgewood, which now has a large Polish community. When The Gates, the enormous installation created by Christo and Jeanne Claude spanned Central Park in 2005, they were sent there. Many of the themes of my course have now become the standard fare of Cultural Studies, but I tried to make my course as free of labels and jargon as possible. The word “postmodernism” never appeared, nor did anyone think that they were “interrogating” anything in particular. The only contemporary critical term which might have described my course was “conversation.” The students were eager to ask questions and eager to talk to each other. On the whole, I think the main achievement of the course was to break down the barriers which often estrange students from each other in a large urban university where, because of the size of the population, and the particularly harried lives that the students lead, they rarely socialize outside their own cultural or social group. Instead of having an opportunity to run away from what they perceived as “other,” they had to sit with it, and often were able to discover that the distance between “other” and “similar” was not as large as they thought. The challenge of teaching the course inspired me to explore the city myself. I haven’t kept up with my goal as much as I had intended, but I continue to walk the city as much as the weather will permit. As Spring approaches, I’m planning some new explorations. Staten Island and the Bronx are still unknown territories to me, and like Huck Finn I shall set out for the territories when the temperatures are milder and the days longer.
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