In the 1945 movie “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” based on Betty Smith’s novel about immigrants living in Brooklyn, New York, around the turn of the last century, we come across a scene of great import for us today. Francie and her brother Neeley are seated in their tenement apartment with their mother Katie and their grandmother. Every evening, the two children read aloud a page from the Bible and from Shakespeare while the two women sew.
On this particular evening, Neeley complains that no one in the room understands the lines from Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” Katie tentatively agrees with him, but then says that the grandmother had long ago told her that these were the two greatest books. Maybe, Katie added, reading them “might even get you a job some day.”
