In this collection of short non-fiction, Dorothy Gallagher explores the history of her family -- from their immigration to America to their small everyday hurts -- and how their history shaped her life.

It is Ms. Gallagher's memoir of sorts, though the pieces are not chronologically ordered, but rather focus on specific moments in the lives of her parents, aunts, uncles and sometimes the author herself.

With wry humor but sympathetic and loving approach, Ms. Gallagher regales the reader with stories of her parent's beginning in America, to the adventures of her extended family. She tells about he aunt Lilly's business transactions with prostitutes and of a family friend who is found murdered in his bath tub. She recalls her cousin Mayer's trip to the old country where he finds his family starving, and exposes us to the family's communist ideology to which they cling. Thus we travel from a small town in the Ukraine to the lower East side of New York and back again. We are transported from the mass executions in Odessa to the beginning of Stalin's reign in Russia to the McCarthy era in the USA to present day.

These entertaining and episodes, put together convey a larger story, a story of a generation experiencing the history of the Jews in America, the acclimation into American culture as well as the author's journey to independence. A very Jewish American experience.

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