The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers
by Harry Bernstein
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harry BernsteinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 0345496108
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers
Book Review: A Tale right Out of Dickens
Summary: 5 Stars
This tale of a hard scrabble childhood and a forbidden love was a compelling read. I couldn't put it down. Because the events are so tragic I began to think of it as fiction. When I came upon the inserted photographs of the author and his family I was shocked back to reality. Bernstien portrays his father as an unkind, selfish, violent brute. However, when he reveals his father's own tragic history the reader can understand why he behaves as he does. Married off to an unsuspecting kind, compassionate orphan girl, he proceeds to father a large family. He drinks and gambels so much that the family does not have enough food or decent shoes. At the center of the memoir is the forbidden love and marriage between Harry's older and intellectual sister and a Christian boy from across the street. The story is rife with incidents of anti-semitism and prejudice. Yet these two young people with the experience of WWI behind them choose happiness where they find it and build a life together without the participation of their families. At the end of the tale the family is on a ship to America which has been his mother's lifelong dream. Bernstien wrote and published this book when he was 96. He worked as a professional writer all his life but was unable to write a publishable novel. He has written another and I look forward to it.
Summary of The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers
?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.
A wonderfully charming memoir written when the author was ninety-three, The Invisible Wall 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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