Silent Masterworks at the New York Jewish Film Festival — newyorker.com

This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, running Jan. 14-29 at Film Society of Lincoln Center, offers welcome restorations of several rare silent classics. D. W. Griffith’s “A Child of the Ghetto,” made in 1910, just two years into his directorial career, displays a playfully innovative movie technique. (The film screens on Jan. 24.) The ghetto of the title is New York’s Lower East Side; the “child” is an unnamed, newly orphaned Jewish adolescent (Dorothy West) who takes in piecework for a garment factory. Falsely accused of stealing by her boss, and hotly pursued by the police, she ends up in the countryside, where the grown son of a farm family finds her and takes her in. Her hard-won new tranquillity is threatened, however, by a chance visit from a city policeman.

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