The most venerable and old world thing your family can be in New York City is Dutch. They were the founders of the city and one third of the city flag is orange, in honor of the House of Orange.
The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Doomed City is a classic Russian dystopian novel which was started in the 1960’s but not released until the 1980’s. Writing the novel and then hiding it was a seditious act. Owning the once solitary manuscript copy was to court disaster in the form of the harsh retribution of the state.
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin is a compact nearly four hundred page collection of Berlin’s stories, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.