How I Came Into My Inheritance: and Other True Stories

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.

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.