Her parents were the Jewish writer and merchant Menashe Galperin [ru] (1871–1960) and Tema Naftulovna Kormanskaia (1872–1941).
Galperina was educated at home by private tutors, and her family moved frequently throughout her youth.
She eventually settled in Moscow, where she worked as an editor at the state-run Foreign Languages Publishing House.
[4] Authors translated by Galperina include James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Hans Fallada, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Fühmann, O. Henry, E. T. A. Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Dieter Noll, Hans Erich Nossack, Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Seghers, Robert Sheckley, Adalbert Stifter, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain, and Stefan Zweig.
Her first husband was Pawel Nikolajewitsch Mostowenko [ru] (1881–1938), who served as rector of Bauman Moscow State Technical University from 1927 to 1930,[3][7] was executed in 1938 during the purges and was rehabilitated in 1955.