When he started peddling herring from a barrel after his arrival in America from Poland, Joel Russ could not have imagined that he was creating a gastronomic legend. Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, by his grandson Mark Russ Federman, tells the story of the beloved Lower East Side store—from its humble beginnings, through the years of the Depression, food rationing, and neighborhood blight, to the renaissance of an area from which most other family-owned stores had fled. Federman’s book is filled with delightful anecdotes about how a hardworking family turned a passion for selling smoked and pickled fish into an international institution. Russ & Daughters combines a heartwarming immigrant saga with a panoramic history of 20th-century New York, a meditation on creating and selling gourmet food, and a behind-the-scenes look at four generations of a family that is “just a little bit crazy on the subject of fish.” Federman will be available to sign books after the discussion.