Filmmaker Shuli Eshel first saw Maxwell Street in 1990, as she drove through to interview some south-side artists. A recent transplant to Chicago, she hadn’t been aware of the neighborhood’s past as a port of entry for immigrants and a center for blues culture. Her curiosity piqued, she checked out several exhibits on the street’s history. As she learned more about the area’s past, she also discovered that the waves of Jewish immigrants who’d settled in it were from eastern Europe and Russia, where her own ancestors had lived before leaving for Palestine in the 1820s.
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“I felt an immediate kinship, a sympathy for those from a humble background who come to a new country with no money, little skill except the determination to rise up, to make life better for their children,” Eshel says. She toyed with the idea of documenting how Maxwell Street thrived, intrigued by the way its ethic of hard work and tolerance was instilled in kids who grew up to be prominent businessmen, lawyers, and politicians.
In the late 80s–“feeling exhausted by the tense atmosphere in Israel”–Eshel spent a year in New York, raising funds and preparing to begin a documentary on women’s roles in the Arab-Israeli conflict. She visited Chicago and decided she could “use the city as a base for my projects on both social issues and artists.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea, courtesy University of Illinois at Chicago, The University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection.
