Crossing Delancey: A Pickle Seller's Love Story Turns 30
Comedian Jenny Slate is fervent in her love of Crossing Delancey. In interview after interview, she calls it one of her favorite movies. “I first saw this movie when I was a little girl,” she told Rotten Tomatoes (where the film is rated 91% fresh). “I was so drawn to Amy Irving, her personal style in this film. I loved this story of a progressive, intelligent, Jewish New Yorker who was so bonded to her grandmother, but not necessarily to her cultural traditions. And what a great romance! There is nothing else like this movie.”
Amen to that. In Joan Micklin Silver’s underappreciated 1988 classic, Izzy (Amy Irving), in a succession of fabulous loose outfits blending Annie Hall and velvet-y proto-East-Village boho, runs an uptown reading series for an independent bookstore. She regularly heads downtown, though, to the Lower East Side, to visit her savvy, snarky Bubbie (Yiddish theater legend Reizl Bozyk, in her only film) in Seward Park. Izzy leads a full life: She’s a literary tastemaker; her boss adores her; she is in possession of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s unlisted phone number; she has great, funny female friends and a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment. And she kills her own spiders. But Bubbie frets about her granddaughter’s single state (“She lives alone in a room, like a dog!”) and hires a matchmaker (played by the voracious, hilarious, slightly terrifying Sylvia Miles) to find Izzy a man.
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