How I Came into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories - Softcover

Gallagher, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375503463 ISBN 13: 9780375503467

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2001

Synopsis

The author describes growing up in Washington Heights as a member of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family with left-wing political leanings, in a series of episodes that chronicles her childhood, family secrets, and writing career.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375503463
• ISBN 13: 9780375503467
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 187