The War Zone of Childhood : THE KINGDOM OF BROOKLYN, <i> By Merrill Joan Gerber (Longstreet Press: $18.95; 239 pp.)</i>

The time is the 1940s; the place is Brooklyn, a world unto itself--uneasy seaside domain of leafy avenues and luxuriant parks bordered by humble two-story row houses. A good many of their Jewish occupants are only a generation away from persecution, and marked indelibly by the perils their parents fled.

Like Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep” and Christina Stead’s “The Man Who Loved Children,” Merrill Joan Gerber’s superb evocation of an anguished child’s faltering steps toward consciousness is set in a house divided, in this case literally: mother, father and two small daughters on the first floor, unmarried aunt and widowed grandmother upstairs. Below is the cellar, dark realm of terror to Issa, the child narrator, where the house’s entrails, especially the fiery furnace, personify the ancient furies that shape the fates lived out above.

Gerber has written often--and grippingly--of tormented families, most recently in her award-winning “King of the World,” about marital abuse, 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: It sometimes reads as though the tribulations of Medea and Jason were told from the point of view of the children.

It is wartime, to begin with; uniformed soldiers are everywhere; housewives roll bandages and save tin cans. After a while that distant war ends, but the domestic battles continue with no relief in sight. The tyrant is Issa’s mother, Ruth, an embittered emotional terrorist who rules the passive family by her headaches, tantrums and suicide threats, but most of all by the force of her uncontrollable malice.

Ruth is hyperbolic, a figure whose misery exceeds her circumstances; readers who require a neat post-Freudian etiology of neurosis and family dysfunction will be unsatisfied. Her only consolation is playing the piano, repetitively, desperately. “She rocks as if in pain on the piano bench,” Issa observes, “and her fingers play the mournful, grieving notes without her seeming to know it. . . . She lifts her head but doesn’t see me. . . . Her face is covered with tears, is slick and shining with them. They drip down, over her fingers, over the keys. On and on she plays.”

Issa’s father, an antiques dealer who brings her CARE packages in the form of cartons of old books from estate sales, is sweet-natured but ineffectual, bound to his wife by sex and duty. Aunt Gilda, who runs an unlicensed hairdressing business upstairs, is a second mother to Issa--in a wry reversal of legend, the good stepmother is no match for the wicked and more beautiful mother. Indeed, Issa wishes guiltily that the acne-scarred Gilda were her real mother.

The domestic turmoil revealed in a limpid, pure prose that mirrors the child’s raw perceptions serves as background for the real story: Issa’s grasping the paradoxes of the inner life and becoming a person despite the bleakness and cruelty that thwart her: “Bad things often give you good feelings, but no one is allowed to say this. Bad things force you to be excited, to push yourself out in a new way, to get busy, then get tired, then be happy to rest, too tired to be afraid.”

For what is imprinted first and most powerfully on the child’s mind is fear. Fear of accidents, sickness and death, fear that her father may have a mishap and not return from work. Fear of school, looming in the future. Fear of the wide world outside, of life itself; an elemental, unexplained fear bred in the bone and nourished by history. Even the roller skates Issa longs for are forbidden--emblem of freedom, mobility, and camaraderie.

Above all, Issa learns fear of her mother, a fear not tempered but exacerbated by fascination, love and dependence. Small wonder that she cannot swallow the food her mother forces on her, or that she is a fretful child, craving attention, aping her mother’s headaches and tantrums. “My mother wants an exact copy of herself,” Issa knows, but cannot always comply: “Although I may be hers, I am not her.”

Her strength is in resilience: “Grownups can be wrong and grownups can be stupid,” she discovers early on. “I am shocked but deeply satisfied by this idea. I feel stronger, knowing it.” Soon she grasps another energizing truth: “Anything that happens away from the house is good. Anything that happens in the house gives me terrible stomach pains.”

Clever and alert, Issa watches and records the milestones of family life--illness, death, birth--reeling past chaotically.

Along with the enthralled, appalled reader, Issa gropes to find logic in pandemonium, gradually unraveling the strands of history that bind her to the present. She learns that years ago her mother had to leave school to support her own widowed mother and sister, and nurses a gnawing resentment. By rights, Gilda should have been Issa’s mother, it turns out: The wily Ruth lured away her sister’s blind date and married him. Issa senses, too, that her father and Gilda love each other, but captive as they are, must seek furtive moments together--such as emptying the garbage each evening. In revenge, Ruth locks the doors between the apartments, ruins Gilda’s chances for marriage and possibly ruins her hairdressing business as well.

As Issa anticipates, though, what happens away from the house does sustain life. School, friends, books, a puppy, a bicycle and, as she nears puberty, a new boy down the block and his devil-may-care mother all invigorate her with pleasure, possibility and a sense of self apart from the erosions of family life: “I am sometimes Issa and sometimes I . . . Issa in all of time, deep in the heart of all I know. This is a deeply comfortable place to be . . . where I will always understand myself. More and more I like to go there, to float in the sensation of Issa Nowhere, Issa Knowing.”

The sisters’ unabated sexual rivalry fuels the tension in the house, finally to the point of explosion. Ready or not, Issa is catapulted into autonomy by the horrendous climax, an event both chastening and liberating. In one dramatic stroke, Gerber releases the primitive impulses that roil the doomed family, and the forebodings that make her novel crackle with suspense are fulfilled.

The wonder of it all is that Issa survives her childhood, a testimony to a spirit that insists on seeking life and light amid grotesquerie. “The Kingdom of Brooklyn” joins a tradition of Bildungsromans of a very special sort--novels whose protagonists are educated not through worldly enlightenment but through pain and confusion. Out of the war zone of childhood, Issa emerges into an ambiguous future, rich in opportunity, blighted by premature wisdom.