PASADENA, Calif.-Most adults remember bits and pieces of their childhood and stories they may have heard about their ancestors. Merrill Joan Gerber, a fiction writer and a teacher of fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology, has, in many of her works of fiction, used as her material the rich sources of family history.
Her new novel, "The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn," illuminates the lives of three generations of women belonging to a Jewish American family in New York. Gerber explores the yearnings, loves, and struggles of women who try to adapt the Jewish rituals of the "old country" to the realities of the new world. "My deepest experiences have been in the heart of the family," says Gerber.
"The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn" will be published this month. Gerber will read and discuss her novel on Tuesday, November 6, at the Huntington Library in the Overseer's room at 2:30 p.m. and also on Thursday, November 8, at Vroman's Bookstore, at 7 p.m.
After growing up in New York, Gerber moved to California with her husband and child in 1962 when she received the Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship at Stanford University. She came to Caltech in 1989 to share her knowledge and wisdom about fiction writing.
Her books include "Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence" (a travel memoir), the novels "Anna in the Afterlife" (which was chosen as a "best book of 2002" by the "Los Angeles Times"), and "King of the World," which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award as an "important and unusual book of literary distinction."
Another novel, "The Kingdom of Brooklyn," won "Hadassah Magazine's" Ribalow Prize for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme." Her short stories have appeared in the "New Yorker," the "Atlantic," "Mademoiselle," and "Redbook," and in many literary magazines. Her short story "I Don't Believe This" was chosen for "Prize Stories 1986: The O. Henry Awards."
The author can be reached at [email protected] or via her webpage at http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~mjgerber.
