How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories - Hardcover

Gallagher, Dorothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330488503 ISBN 13: 9780330488501

Publisher: Random House, 2001

Synopsis

Dorothy Gallagher began her literary career fabricating sensational stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine whose other writers included Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman. Nothing she made up, though, could rival in color and drama the true story of her own family; Russian-immigrant Jews who lived in Washington Heights, swore allegiance to Marx and Stalin, and tried to ignore the realities of the new world in which their daughter had to make her way. Her mother tells Dorothy that the black girls who beat her up after school are the real victims. Her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine during the thirties and finds, to his astonishment, that the whole village is near death from starvation; still he retains his belief in Stalin's leadership. Dorothy moves into a loft on the Bowery, and her father scrounges wood for her stove from nearby vacant lots. She signs a contract for a book with a famous editor and is plunged into despair when he rejects her manuscript. Her Aunt Clara is murdered in her Bronx apartment, and Dorothy is questioned by the police. These stories stand on their own vivid, ironic, darkly funny, and completely original in style. Taken together, they create a unique, brilliantly realized world.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Readers who relish the truth...will be intoxicated...and will accept her inheritance as their own.”–The New York Times Book Review

“A witty account, colored by an edgy darkness, of her family’s attempts to make sense of this country.”–The Washington Post

“Hilarious and alarming.”–Los Angles Times Book Review

“These family remembrances serve as a reminder to parents and children alike that what lies ahead in life often sneaks up from behind.” –The New Yorker

“A piercingly funny book . . . unsentimental, breezy, blunt.”–Time

From Publishers Weekly

Gallagher's previous nonfiction (Hannah's Daughters: Six Generations of an American Family and All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carla Tresca) chronicled other people's lives. Now she turns her considerable talents to her own immigrant family's history, and the result is an autobiography written with the elegance and simplicity of a fine novel. The individual chaptersAthe "true stories" of Gallagher's lifeAbeautifully render her experiences growing up as the child of left-wing Ukrainian ?migr?s in 1940s New York. Discussions about Stalin and Trotsky were the stuff of everyday life; a framed picture of Lenin hung in the attic (which, Gallagher explains, she always thought was a picture of her grandfather). Gallagher recounts anxiously hiding her family's copy of the Communist Daily Worker in the New York Post, as well as her frustrations with Camp Wochica ("Workers' Children's Camp," she assures us, "in case you thought it was your standard inauthentic Indian name"). The family's friends and relatives are as richly vivid as fictional characters: an aunt sells lingerie to prostitutes during the Depression; a family friend is found mysteriously murdered in her bathtub; an uncle recites poetry to his fellow nursing home residents. Gallagher effectively conveys the sense of familial narratives that have been handedAsometimes with great solemnity and at other times carelesslyAfrom one generation to the next. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Feb. 16) Forecast: Rapturously blurbed by literary luminaries Alice Munro, Susan Minot and James Salter, and supported by author readings in New York City, this resonant memoir is an obvious pick for fans of Jewish autobiography and New York history. If it garners the enthusiastic review attention it deserves in mainstream and Jewish publications, it could break out to wider audiences.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330488503
• ISBN 13: 9780330488501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208