In 2009, he published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the United States when he was twelve. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book. The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and published in 2007, when he was 96. Harry Louis Bernstein was a British-born American writer whose first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, dealt with his abusive, alcoholic father, the anti-Semitism he encountered growing up in a Lancashire mill town (Stockport - now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England, and the Romeo and Juliet-like romance experienced by his sister and her Christian boyfriend. It is a moving tale of working-class life, and of the boundaries that can be overcome by love. When Harry unwittingly discovers their secret affair, he must choose between the morals he's been taught all his life, his loyalty to his selfless mother, and what he knows to be true in his own heart.Ī wonderfully charming memoir written when the author was ninety-three, The Invisible Wall vibrantly brings to life an all-but-forgotten time and place. Then Harry's older sister, Lily, does the unthinkable: She falls in love with Arthur, a Christian boy from across the street. Harry's mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams: new shoes that might secure Harry's admission to a fancy school that her daughter might marry the local rabbi that the entire family might one day be whisked off to the paradise of America. His father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. On the eve of World War I, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. Only a few feet of cobblestones separated Jews from Gentiles, but socially, it they were miles apart. It was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the "invisible wall" that ran down its center, dividing Jewish families on one side from Christian families on the other. The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was seemingly unremarkable. It was inevitable that I should write about it and the people who lived on both sides of its "Invisible Wall." A little cobbled street in a smoky mill town in the North of England has haunted me for the greater part of my life. There are places that I have never forgotten.
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