num_pages: 208
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 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.
language: English
title: How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories
titlecomplete: How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories
genres: Jewish, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, American, Essays
ratings_count: 165
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Koret Jewish Book Award
category: Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study
publisher: Vintage