Publisher's Synopsis
Nothing Dorothy Gallagher made up for her fabricated sensational stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine could rival in color and drama the true story of her own family. Russian-immigrant Jews living in Washington Heights, they swore allegiance to Marx and Stalin while ignoring the realities of the new world in which their daughter had to make her way. Her cousin Meyer returns home to the Ukraine during the 1930s and finds the whole village is near death from starvation. 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 plunges 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 and darkly funny. Taken together they create a unique, brilliantly realized world.
