Book Of The Month December, 2007
The Invisible WallHarry Bernstein
Harry Bernstein was born into a world of hardship and suffering in a northern mill town, in the shadow of the First World War. His brutish father spends what little he earns at the tailoring shop on drink, while his devoted mother survives on her dreams that new shoes might secure Harry s admission to a fancy school, that her daughter might marry well, and that one day they might all escape this grinding poverty for the paradise of America. But as the years go by, life for the Bernsteins on their narrow cobbled street remains a daily struggle to make ends meet. For young Harry though, most distressing are his fears for his adored elder sister Lily, who is risking all by pursuing a forbidden love
What We Think
Harry Bernstein on his book The Invisible Wall:
Despite all the advances medical science has made in the field of longevity, increasing average life span almost two-fold in the last century, the nineties are still considered a ripe old age, with little left to be lived. Since I am well into my nineties – ninety-seven to be exact at this writing – I fall into that category, with an uncertain but most definitely brief future to look forward to. As a result, I should not expect that anything of significance could happen to me in the little bit that remains of my life. Yet, quite the contrary has happened, and my nineties have thus far been the most productive and exciting time of my entire life.
I have accomplished an ambition I have held all through my life, from the time when I was a child in school, which was to be a writer. I tried and I tried hard, with only occasional but minor success as I grew older, but generally speaking with almost complete failure to achieve the stature of a writer whose work would become known to many people and receive acclaim from the critics.
My sudden success, coming at the age of ninety-six with the publication of my first book, The Invisible Wall, came about through terrible circumstances, through the death of my wife Ruby, to whom I had been married joyfully for sixty-seven wonderful years. Her death left me stunned and broken. For months I was unable to function, and I was in a deep depressed state, as if I had died along with her.
It was writing that saved me. I turned to it as the only thing I knew that could take my mind off my grief. It was like reaching for a life-saving medicine. It was also something Ruby would have wanted me to do. She had always been an admirer – often the only one – of my writing and had encouraged me to go on with it no matter how often my novels were rejected.
I was soon steeped in what I was doing, forgetful of everything else. The writing came smoothly and swiftly, far more easily than anything else I had ever done. I was writing about my past life in England, which was about as far away from the present as I could get. It was about the mill town in Lancashire where I had been born, about my family, my friends, but particularly the small cobbled street where I lived that had two distinct sides, one Christian, one Jewish. The distance between them, geographically, I wrote, was only a few yards, but socially it was miles, and between them was an invisible wall.
History repeated itself after I had finished the book and began sending it out to publishers. One after another rejected it. It didn’t bother me. I was accustomed to this. I continued to send it out, until it occurred to me that since it was a story about England it might appeal to an English publisher.
I was right. One day I received a telephone call from an editor at Random House in London, telling me how much she liked the book and wanted to publish it.
So there it was – after a lifetime of trying, when my life was practically over, and I was more than halfway into my nineties, I had finally made it. And when the book was published I found myself in an exciting world of interviews by the media, newspapers, TV, radio. The reviews had been highly favourable, and there were articles about me, and one morning I found my picture on the front page of the New York Times. I stared at it for a long time, wondering if all this could be true.
I do know that much of the fuss that was being made was the result of genuine appreciation of my writing; I’d done a good job. But much of it was also due to the fact that I was making my debut as a writer at the age of ninety-six, and this attracted as much attention as the writing itself. And a lot of wonder, too. Not only book critics, but people generally, have difficulty believing that anyone of my age still has the ability to think, much less write a book, and one that involves memory of events that go back so many years.
I can’t solve that mystery for them. I do know that I have done it, and I am not the only one to prove that age need not necessarily be a barrier to creative thinking. Only recently an 85-year-old woman novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I myself don’t think I will ever reach those heights. But at ninety-seven I have made a place for myself in the world, and I intend to keep it for as long or short as I have to live.
My second book, The Dream, which is a sequel to the first, will soon be published, and a third book is in preparation. I do not know if I am going to make it to the finish. But I will do what I have always done, and what has made up amply for past failures. I will keep trying.