How I Came Into My Inheritance: and Other True Stories - Softcover

Gallagher, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375503463 ISBN 13: 9780375503467

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

About the Author

Dorothy Gallagher was born and raised in New York City. She was a features editor for Redbook magazine, and then became a freelance writer, and her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Grand Street. Her two previous books are Hannah's Daughters, an account of a six-generation matrilineal family, and All the Right Enemies, a biography of the Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca. She lives in New York.

From the Inside Flap

agher 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

Reviews

Adult/High School-The boroughs of New York are fertile ground for ethnic traditions to flourish, but bumpy territory for the daughter of Russian immigrants who embraces communist philosophy. In this memoir, Gallagher introduces her parents at the end of their lives and then works backward to impart the tribulations of her colorful family dynamics. The personalities of her aunts, uncles, mother, and father are like a road map, with cloverleafs that eventually merge into Gallagher's life-the choices made for her and those she pursued independently. The story picks up speed with her post-teen dalliances. She describes with humor her attempts at various jobs and relationships before finding a niche in tabloid journalism and then writing books. Young adults will like the coffee-klatch style of writing and just might get a fresh insight into their own heritage.

Karen Sokol, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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.

In this new work, New York City writer Gallagher (Hannah's Daughters: Six Generations of an American Family) casts her clear, ironic eye on her own familyDand what a group they are. Aunt Lily made good money selling lingerie to hookers; Aunt Sally's letters always cited the exact price of everything she mentioned. Individual and eccentric to the core, they nonetheless represent their time and place: Russian immigrant Jews living in Washington Heights and remaining loyal to Marx and Stalin. Their ideology was not designed to make Gallagher's childhood easy. Her mother, for example, insisted that the black girls who beat Dorothy up at school were the real victims. And for Gallagher, the mysteries of sex were simple compared to those of "Trotskyites" and "right-wing deviationists." Gallagher began writing by cranking out material for fan magazines at Magazine Management Co., and there she met a co-worker immersed in writing a novel about the Mafia: yes, Mario Puzo. Gallagher tells the story of her family and her writing career in short, sharply focused scenes that are frequently comic and sometimes (especially in the first title essay) very touching. Recommended for regional collections.DMary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gallagher affects a jaunty insouciance and writes with disarming briskness about potentially abysmal subjects, thus plumbing depths of feeling without wallowing in them. An only child, she begins her episodic memoir at the messy end of her ailing parents' lives, neatly dissecting the trauma of having to assume a slippery authority over her forcefully eccentric father and diffident mother. As with each of Gallagher's urbane and deftly told personal essays, however, there's a twist, in this case the appearance of a shyster set on bilking her father out of his money. Having resolved that potential disaster, Gallagher goes back to her childhood in New York City's Washington Heights, where she came of age steeped in the socialist values of her Russian Jewish parents and the conflicts and conspiracies that brewed among her mother's siblings. Her family stories are marvelously piquant, and the arresting tales of her own struggles with disappointing marriages, illegal abortions, and a consciousness-raising stint as a writer for a pulp fan magazine are pure pleasure to imbibe and ponder. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After my mother broke her hip, I put her in a nursing home.
"You want to put me here?" she said.

The woman was certified senile, but she still knew how to push my buttons. Not that she didn't have reason to worry; had I listened when she'd begged me "Darling, please, please don't do anything
to hurt Daddy. It will kill him . . ."?

I swear, what I did, it wasn't just for the money.

You know that tone people take about old age? The stuff about dignity and wisdom and how old people (pardon me for saying old) should be allowed to make their own decisions. Allowed! My father treated nicely reasoned arguments like mosquitoes. As for dignity, let's pass over the question of bodily wastes for the moment; let's suppose that the chronologically challenged father of one such pious person decided to torture and starve his or her chronologically challenged mother. ("So she falls! She'll lie
there till she gets up! . . . What does she need orange juice for? If she's thirsty she'll drink water!") And not only that, but also gives away practically all that person's inheritance to a crook. Do you think you
might see any revisionism in attitude then?

Until the day I took him to court and the judge laid down the law, nobody, but nobody, interfered with my father. I mean, he was awesome. For instance, he owned this slum building. It was filled with some characters you wouldn't want to meet in broad daylight on a busy street. The tenants didn't pay rent, welfare paid the rent. But welfare didn't pay exactly as much as my father was legally entitled to. So every month, even when he was up in his late eighties, he'd get in his car and drive over to that building, haul himself up the stairs, bang his cane on every door, and demand his five or ten dollars. He got it. Nobody laid a finger on him. Nobody even slammed the door in his face. And the only way you could tell he might be even a little bit nervous was that he left his motor running. And the car was never stolen!

It wasn't easy to tell when my father began to lose his marbles, because he'd always been such a headstrong summabitch, as he called everyone who had a slightly different idea. But the winter he was ninety he took out the water heater. That was a clue. I went up there one day — they lived about sixty miles upstate in this house they'd lived in forever. Now, the house should have been my first clue. I knew that house. I grew up there. If ever there was a homemade house, that was it. My father built it all around us. First we were living in two rooms, then three; nine by the time he got finished, the rooms all stuck on in unexpected places, connected by closets you walked through to get to other rooms, short dark corridors and twisting staircases. He never got tired of making new rooms. When I was a kid I thought he had made the world. Like once, we needed a shovel for the woodstove. My father took a metal ice
tray, cut off one end, rounded it, put a hole in the other end, and stuck a bit of pipe in. Voilà! I idolized that man.

And now the house was a wreck: jury-rigged electrical cords you tripped over, water dripping from the roof, buckets on the floor, smells of accumulated filth. I'd piss in my pants before I'd go into the bathroom.

But the thing is, I still believed in my father; he'd always taken care of everything. So when I'd say, "Daddy, there's a leak over Mama's bed. Let me find someone to fix the roof,"and he'd say, "Don't you do anything, I'll take care of it," I'd think, Okay, I guess he knows what he's doing.

Or I might say, "I'll get somebody to clean the house."

"It's clean! Mama cleans!"

So I say, "Mama, when did you clean the house?" She says, dementedly, "You saw, I just swept out. You know it doesn't get so dirty in the country."

I say, "But it smells bad," and my father says, "It doesn't smell!" I'd think: He seems sure. I guess it's not so bad. And everything happened so gradually.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375503463
• ISBN 13: 9780375503467
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208