25th Anniversary Season: The Immigrant
By
Mark Harelik
Directed by John McCluggage
January 28 - February 26, 2006
“Honest, emotions of ‘Immigrant’ capture audience…” - Daily Variety
A touching and uplifting true story that follows a young Jewish man who, fleeing the oppression of Czarist Russia in 1909, winds up pushing his banana cart into the tiny Baptist town of Hamilton, Texas. Given shelter by a childless older couple, he sends for his wife, raises a family, and makes the tiny Texas town his home.
This unlikely story of “blooming where you’re planted” is based on the life of Harelik’s grandfather, a champion of the movement to relocate immigrating Eastern European Jews away from the Eastern seaboard cities toward the labor-hungry, open West—a program that brought nearly 10,000 people to America through Galveston, Texas. The Immigrant is a tale of parents and children, newcomers and natives, Christians and Jews, and the realization that the dreams that bind us together are often the same.