The invisible wall - Harry Bernstein

This wonderfully charming memoir, written when the author was 93, vibrantly brings to life an all-but-forgotten time and place. It is a moving tale of working-class life, and of the boundaries that can be overcome by love.

"There are places that I have never forgotten. A little cobbled street in a smoky
mill town in the North of England has haunted me for the greater part of my life.
It was inevitable that I should write about it and the people who lived on both sides
of its 'Invisible Wall.' "

The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a
small English mill town, was seemingly unremarkable. 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. Only a few feet of cobblestones
separated Jews from Gentiles, but socially, it they were miles apart.

On the eve
of World War I, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. His father earns little
money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend
his wages drinking and gambling. 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.

Then Harry's older
sister, Lily, does the unthinkable: She falls in love with Arthur, a Christian boy
from across the street.

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.