To Brooklyn With Love

Plot

This is the magical tale of a single, sweltering summer day in the life of a 12-year-old boy. The world of Albert Abrams comprises a few square blocks of Brownsville in Depression-era Brooklyn; a world of forgotten street games and survival of the fittest, where the melting pot of Jews, Poles, Italians and blacks is bubbling in 1933 like asphalt in the July heat.

The family's patriarch is an irascible, endearing general practitioner (see "The Last Angry Man" for the genesis of his character). His wife is serene, a pillar of reason, retreating to her cool parlor for the classics and mahjong while the doctor rants at his ungrateful patients and his luck. The streets outside are a jungle of youthful gangs, dark and dangerous corners, and stickball played practically to the death-everything, in other words, a young boy could ask of a summer day. In the midst of it all, Albert can still find time for the pure pleasure of a breakfast bagel with cream cheese and the sports section of the New York Times, where he savors the language with the same joy that the author apparently does.

The adventures of this day speak volumes about a time I never knew and a place I'd never been when I first read the book more than 30 years ago. I've lent it to anyone who would try it. In fact, it's out right now. Brownsville comes alive in a tapestry of characters and voices and sights and sounds-Yiddish words and Irish slang and the imagined smell of exploding garbage bags on a hot sidewalk, right through to the peace and fading clatter of a summer night. You'll swear you hear a childish voice yell, "Ringalevio!" from the next block...or the last century. Few books are this memorable, and few images as vivid as those in this little epic from Gerald Green.