How I Came Into My Inheritance
And Other True Stories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Dorothy Gallagher began her literary career fabricating stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine. Nothing she invented, however, could rival the facts surrounding her own family.
In a singular voice–intimate, fierce, hilarious–Gallagher takes you into the heart of her Russian Jewish heritage with stories as elegant and stylish as fiction. From the wrenching last stages of her parents’ lives, Gallagher moves back through time: to her parents’ beginnings, the adventures of her extended family, and the communist ideology to which they cling. Her aunt Lily sells lingerie to prostitutes; a family friend is found murdered in a bathtub; her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine to find his village near death from starvation; and a young Gallagher endures sessions in self-criticism at a Workers’ Children’s camp. Together these episodes tell the larger story of a generation living through tumultuous history, and record the acts of loving defiance of a daughter on her path to independence.
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 chapters--the "true stories" of Gallagher's life--beautifully 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 handed--sometimes with great solemnity and at other times carelessly--from one generation to the next.
