Grandmother's Codfish Balls

Or, the Strangeness of Home

This week my students at Marymount watched Hester Street, a 1975 film about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side based on a forgotten masterpiece of American realism called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Yekl was published in 1896, championed by one of my favorite authors from that time period, William Dean Howells, who you probably associate …