The photo is of Harry and Ruby Bernstein, married for 67 years. Bernstein, a man who never gave up as a writer, has a mind-bending story. He wrote 40 books and destroyed
most of the manuscripts as they were rejected, as all of them were. When he was
93 Ruby died and the pain was so intense that he wrote a memoir to help
him cope with his grief.
He took three
years to finish the book which he called The Invisible Wall. It’s about his bleak early childhood years,
growing up in the Cheshire/Lancashire mill town of Stockport in the early
1900s.
Harry’s
parents had fled persecution in the Pale of Settlement (created in Russia by
Catherine the Great in 1791), seeking a refuge in England. They settled in the dead-end
East Street in a very poor part of town, Daw Bank, where Jews lived on one side
and Christians on the other. Harry was born in 1910. He had six siblings, an
alcoholic, abusive brute of a father and a long-suffering mother who took the
abuse and tried to take care of her children. She would grovel under fruit
stands looking for food. Harry remembers often being hungry and tortured by
delicious smells of food being baked.
He also often
had to run from kids who wanted to beat him up. Neighbours stood on their
verandahs and yelled abuse at the Jews, ranting about them killing Christ. But
the bigotry was mutual. Harry’s parents would spit when they passed the
Catholic church. That mutual bigotry, the stench and humiliation of poverty
formed the world Harry grew up in.
The 1914 war
forged something of a bond between Christians and Jews but after the armistice
the bigotry took hold again.
The Invisible Wall is also about a classic Romeo and Juliet love
story. When his older sister fell in love with a Christian boy Harry’s mother
sat shiva for her, declaring her dead. And neither the
poverty nor the abuse crushed Harry’s spirit. When he was 11 years old he
started a newspaper The Gossip. There
was one copy and it circulated among the community.
Harry’s
memoire is raw, gritty, passionate and poetic. He submitted it to a whole lot of New York publishing houses who
all rejected it. But this time he didn’t destroy the manuscript. He persevered,
sending it to the London branch of Random House. Even then it sat on the
shelves along with other unsolicited manuscripts for a year until editor Kate
Elton read it and couldn’t put it down. She later remarked on how well it was
written and that it hardly needed any editing. It was published in 2007.
Harry wasn’t
done. He wrote three more books about other aspects of his life, The Dream, The Golden Willow, and What Happened to Rose. The last was
published posthumously; Harry died in 2011 at the age of 101. While he was
writing he said that these years were the most productive of his life. Is there
a Nobel prize for perseverance and gutzpah?
Faith, courage
and persistence. People who hold onto their own
ideas about their life and keep on working at what moves them until the day
they die are our everyday heroes. Harry
Bernstein, thank you. Standing ovation stuff.
