Unsentimental Journey

By MARGARET CARLSON

Dorothy Gallagher has written a piercingly funny book, and there's not a joke in it. In the first chapter of How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories (Random House; 187 pages; $22.95), she drags us straight into the sick room from hell. She is looking after Bella and Izzy, her failing Russian-Jewish parents. She muddles through with such wryness and tenderness and, finally, wisdom that it will make you ache for another chance to tend your own parents.

It's one thing to be our fathers' and mothers' keepers, another to get it right, quite another to be able to look back at the experience without flinching. Gallagher, 60, says it took two years after her parents died in 1992 before she could go through the notes she had jotted down during her vigil. A writer by trade, she thought she might make one short piece of them. "But then I started typing," she recalls, "and finally a sentence came out where I knew I'd found my voice, and then I had 150 pages." That voice--unsentimental, breezy, blunt--never wavers as she takes us first to her parents' deathbeds and then back to their earlier, happier years.

What makes this book different from some of the more sensational memoirs by less fond daughters is that it takes the ordinary, wrenching dilemma every child faces, peoples it with larger-than-life figures and sorts it all out.

In her parents' final days, Gallagher made daily visits to the vacation house her father had built with his own hands in upstate New York, where he and his wife lived after his retirement. "He never got tired of making new rooms," Gallagher writes. "When I was a kid, I thought he had made the world." But as her parents grow more feeble, the house begins to rot away; eventually it would take a team wearing surgical masks and gloves to clean it out. Her sweet mother is too pliant to complain, her father too stubborn and sick to think straight. Yet to Gallagher, he is still the fearless man who arrived in steerage, took jobs selling bananas (eating nothing but), delivering wet laundry in tenements before running his own garage. His only child finds that she can't tell her 90-year-old father (who made the world, after all) what to do.

Working backward through letters, photos and visits to relatives, Gallagher summons up a universe when a band of utopic Russian emigres arrives in a New York City that no longer exists. Penniless, working for a pittance, they are rich beyond their wildest dreams. She never says how much she actually loves this extended family, except by her affectionate yet dispassionate descriptions of them. There are Bella and Izzy as young communists in love, her father saving her mother from drowning, choosing her over her sister--a revelation to their daughter, who had been worried that her parents weren't romantic enough. There's cousin Meyer, who fled to America to escape the Cossacks, lost his entire family when the Nazis occupied his hometown in Ukraine, raised another family in the U.S. but was so saddened by America's role in Vietnam that he killed himself at 87. And there's Aunt Lily, the clan's career woman, who sold lingerie door to door and married a bookish man, suspect in the family because he "seemed to have no politics."

Like the Amish in Witness, these Socialists in Gallagher's extended family experience life more fully because they believe so deeply. Devoted readers of the Daily Worker, Stalinists to the end ("the pact with Hitler was a tactic, darling"), they sometimes look ridiculous but steadily buoy Gallagher with a bracing sense of connectedness. As a girl, she thought a portrait of Lenin hanging on the wall was a picture of her grandfather. Her summers at "worker's camp," where the oppressed were celebrated, provide wonderful memories, although political purity was strictly enforced: an extra slice of watermelon to a black kid could provoke a rebuke.

Gallagher's adult life, chronicled in the later chapters, is bland by comparison, despite her two bad marriages, several bad abortions and multiple bad bosses. After a hilarious turn at a celebrity pulp magazine, alongside the young Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman, she goes on to write two respected books. This third one ends all too soon, without telling us, among other things, about her third marriage, now 20 years running, to Ben Sonnenberg, whose mind soars as founding editor of the highly regarded literary review Grand Street despite his being confined to a wheelchair. But their story gives us something to look forward to.