MW - GP - MSP "Gangster-Land: A Granddaughter's Story"
February 16, 2025 @ 10:30AM — 12:00PM Central Time (US & Canada) Add to Calendar
Join us for a virtual event with Harriet Grayson, author of "Accidental Gangster: Dutch Schultz and Me" as she shares true experiences about her bootlegger grandfather, Goldy, a fisherman recruited by gangster Dutch Schultz to help transport liquor in the dangerous prohibition days. He walked a thin tightrope avoiding the federal police, as well as rival gangs. Following the speaker's presentation and Q&A opportunity, we will hear a few personal accounts from our own Hadassah members. If anyone in your family had a connection with local or other gangsters, we are interested in your story. Please send a short description to Barbara Parks, hadassahbawbie@yahoo.com. Up to four people will be chosen to give five-minute anecdote.
Harriet Goodman Grayson has been writing fiction for several years. Her latest novel is The Horseman from Baltimore, about her father’s years of service in the Army Air Corps during WW 2 in the China Burma India Theater (CBI). It was the forgotten theater of operation. As a skilled horseman he finds himself in charge of pack mules.
Her book Accidental Gangster: Dutch Schultz and Me is about her grandfather Goldy’s adventures as a bootlegger for the gangster Dutch Schultz. From the start of Prohibition (1920) to its conclusion (1933), Grandfather Goldy brought Canadian whiskey to America on his fishing boats. Grandma Esty feared her husband would land up in jail, killed by the police or more ominously killed by fellow gangsters. Familiar gangsters appear in this fictionalized memoir such as Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Legs Diamond and the biggest bootlegger of them all, Arnold Rothstein.
Earlier during the COVID crisis she released the novel Rockaway Riptides, a coming of age tale for all ages and all times set during the turbulent 1960’s. Her experiences and memories of that tumultuous period led her to write this novel during the present turmoil from a pandemic and political unrest. Ms. Goodman Grayson dedicated the novel to the alumni, staff and faculty of Far Rockaway High School where she spent the mid-1960’s. Her love of fiction and her desire to become a writer started in her teenage years inspired by teachers at the high school.
Under her pen name Anastasia Goodman, she has published a series of mysteries: Loose Ends, Death and Diamonds and The Terrorist. The protagonist of the series is the quirky, Russian-born police detective Sasha Perlov.
Ms. Grayson was educated at Queens College, in Flushing, NY, New York University’s Wagner School (MUP) and the University of Denver (MA in Urban Sociology/Demography). Harriet is an accomplished writer having published academic papers, been a columnist for a woman’s monthly as well as writing a column on small business for a newspaper syndicate.