Description: Dorothy Gallagher began her literary career making up fantastic stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine whose other writers included Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman. But nothing she made up 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 revisits 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 her own 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 Knopf editor who then devastates her by rejecting her manuscript. Her aunt Clara is murdered in her Bronx apartment, and Dorothy is questioned by the police. These scenes stand on their own -- vivid, ironic, and completely original in style. Together they offer a complete world, as singularly American in its way as those of cowboys and Indians, Puritan preachers, and robber barons.

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