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9780099504283

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Harry Bernstein returns home and, magically, takes us with him. With its dancing prose and captivating descriptions of neighborhood life, we experience with the child Harry all the wonder, thrill, and heartbreak of being a working-class kid learning to navigate the balkanized world of Christians and Jews within a single English mill town. Bernstein gives us a people's history, a street-level perspective on a world that might otherwise have been lost, with crucial lessons that will endure throughout time. <br>-Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls <br><br> [An] affecting debut memoir . . . When major world events touch the poverty-stricken block, the individual coming-of-age story is intensified without being trivialized, and the conversational account takes on the heft of a historical novel with stirring success. <br>-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)<br><br><br> From the Hardcover edition.

An exceptional book Guardian A compelling narrative of childhood survival ... the tale has a freshness, a vitality and a relentless energy ... extraordinarily powerful. The Invisible Wall is a triumph of the human spirit over multi-faceted adversity. Daily Mail Extraordinary ... spare, uncomplicated, and terribly vivid for it Independent [A] heart-wrenching memoir ... the setting, beautifully rendered, recalls early DH Lawrence. It is a world of pain and prejudice, evoked in spare, restrained prose that brilliantly illuminates a time, a place and a family struggling valiantly to beat impossible odds. As an emotional experience and a vivid retelling of the author's past, it exerts uncommon power. New York Times A remarkable memoir ... vivid, compassionate and notably unsentimental Times Literary Supplement

A debut by a nonagenarian who recalls a Romeo-and-Juliet story involving his older, Jewish sister and a Christian boy from across the street.Bernstein demands that readers suspend more than disbelief; they must also disengage all skepticism, all critical thinking. His memoir offers no specific dates (we know only that we are in the era of World War I), no documentation, no photocopies, no way for an interested (or dubious) reader to verify any of this story. And what a story. When he is four years old, living in a Lancashire mill town, the author serves as a sort of Huck Finn intermediary, carrying secret love messages between two local lovers (Jewish girl, Christian boy). The author's father is a sort of Pap Finn, too - drunken, sullen, occasionally violent. When his daughter wins a scholarship, he goes off on a rant about education and drags her by the hair to the tailor's shop where she must labor beside him. The author's mother, by contrast, is archetypal - patient, hardworking, loving, forgiving. When he is 11, the author discovers that his sister, Lily, is secretly meeting with her forbidden boyfriend, Arthur - and that they are planning to elope. He goes along with them, then returns later to inform his family. All in the neighborhood - Christians and Jews - are angry. But then Lily has a baby; there is a block party for the new arrival, and the little child unites the residents. Two things that trouble: (1) much of the story is presented in verbatim dialogue, including, when the narrator is ten, a long debate about Socialism at the dinner table; (2) the author is always where he needs to be. A neighborhood suicide? He's there. Key letters from Mom to relatives? He writes as Mom dictates.Seems less a memoir, more an autobiographical novel. Caveat lector. (Kirkus Reviews)

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97-year-old Harry Bernstein emigrated to the USA with his family after the First World War. He has written all his life, but started writing THE INVISIBLE WALL following the death of his wife of 67 years, Ruby. He lives in Brick, New Jersey.

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