The Invisible Wall

The Invisible Wall, by Harry Bernstein, is a fascinating memoir, told with simplicity and sincerity. It’s the story of growing up poor in a grimy British city before the First World War, at a time when and in a place where the line between Jew and gentile was firm and solid -- the street on which Bernstein grew up literally divided the two societies, though both sides shared the same desperate poverty. The book opens with the four-year-old Bernstein duped into serving as the go-between in a love affair between a Jewish girl and a gentile boy, a romance doomed from the start by parental opposition and societal approbation. Bernstein describes the place with a child’s simplicity and an adult understands. Even the smells differed as one crossed the street -- “the odors of bacon and lard and ham” emanating from the Christian kitchens, “the pungent smell of hot chicken soup” from the Jewish houses. But the book is about more than the heartbreak of adolescent romance, or bigotry. It’s also filled with examples of people crossing the line that separates not faiths, but rather that separates simple decency from deliberate cruelty. Much of it rests on narrow minds and religious prejudices, but much more took place behind closed doors on one side of the wall. Either side. Both sides. Written some 70 years later, long after the Bernsteins emigrated to America, The Invisible Wall is beautifully written, its sharp imagery undulled by the passage of time, though the edges of pain and resentment seem to have softened. The book is even more impressive when one realizes it was Bernstein’s first book, begun at the age of 92 and finished at the age of 96. It may have taken a long to be written, but it was well worth waiting for.