The Kingdom of Brooklyn
Merrill Joan Gerber
RIBALOW PRIZE WINNER
Merrill Joan Gerber superbly evokes an anguished child's faltering steps toward consciousness... Gerber has written often—and grippingly—of tormented families… but never as daringly as here.
"In this brutally candid, semiautobiographical novel, Gerber again (as in King of the World) corrosively delineates the heinous abuses inflicted in the name of love, and a victim's ambivalence toward her abuser… Her wry purity of style packs psychological dynamite." —Publishers Weekly
"The Kingdom of Brooklyn offers a rare look into a unique time, place, and culture." —Belles Lettres
"Merrill Joan Gerber's superb evocation of an anguished child's faltering steps toward consciousness... Gerber has written often—and grippingly—of tormented families… but never as daringly as here: Issa is just 3 years old, 'hardly a person yet,' when she begins her 10 year chronicle of violent conflicts and crises. The passions propelling this compact, eloquent novel are virulent, reaching back into the past and shadowing the future." —Los Angeles Times
"Merrill Joan Gerber… demonstrates a remarkable talent for delineating personality, not only of Issa but of all others who interact with her. Her characters have definitive qualities that make them credible, a tribute to her capacity to present the people of her creation, undoubtedly using elements from her own life experiences." —The Jewish Week
About the Author
Merrill Joan Gerber is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1938. She earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Florida and a master's in English at Brandeis University. She then held a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship at Stanford.
Gerber has written some thirty books, including novels, story collections, young adult fiction, memoirs, and essays. King of the World won the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award, and The Kingdom of Brooklyn won the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for the best English-language fiction on a Jewish theme.
Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review, and Redbook, where she published more stories than any other contributor. She has won an O. Henry Award and a Best American Essays honor. She taught writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for thirty-two years, retiring in 2020. Her archive is held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library.