What makes "The Nanny" unique is the breath of fresh air brought by curly-haired, mini-skirted Fran, with her yenta mother and her senile yet groovy Romanian immigrant grandmother.

A natural storyteller with a yenta’s love of mischief, Fierstein paints a vivid portrait of his youth in Bensonhurst, the neighborhood made famous by “The Honeymooners” and “Saturday Night Fever.”

I also liked that she was someone local with local connections who was just trying to be a yenta.

Most book scouts are literary yentas, hoping to make a match, having little control over the result.

Over time, it appears that “yenta” has come to stand for the character’s attributes, not unlike Dickens’s Scrooge, though with the opposite effect.