Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Harry Bernstein
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Book
The dream of escape to America carried Harry’s mother through the harsh years of poverty in a bleak, industrial mill town in the north of England as the First World War raged.
In America, she believed, they would at last be free of the daily struggle to make ends meet, the drunken brutality of her husband, and the religious bigotry which divided their narrow cobbled street.
This is the extraordinary true story of the Bernstein family’s struggle to settle in Chicago and the devastating impact of the Depression; but it’s also a very personal and powerfully moving account of young Harry’s first love, of triumph over adversity and never giving up hope …
About the Author
Ninety-seven-year-old Harry Bernstein emigrated to the USA with his family after the First World War. He has written all his life, but started writing The Invisible Wall following the death of his wife of 67 years, Ruby. The Dream is his second book, and he is now at work on a third. He lives in Brick, New Jersey.
Also by Harry Bernstein
The Invisible Wall
Dedicated to Ruby, whose love made the dream come true
Acknowledgments
My thanks are due to the following people: To Kate Elton for this second chance, to Anna Simpson for the editing that saved me from a lot of mistakes, to Robin Rolewicz for her enthusiasm and encouragement; to Charles and Adraenne for being there when I needed them and for their valuable suggestions; to Serena Evans who did her best for me with getting people to know me; to Bill Tiernan for reading my manuscript and giving me some very important comments; to my caregiver, Bette for helping me stay alive long enough to write this book, and to the many people who read The Invisible Wall, and wrote asking for this book.
Chapter One
DREAMS PLAYED AN important part in our lives in those early days in England. Our mother invented them for us to make up for all the things we lacked and to give us some hope for the future. Perhaps, also, it was for herself, to escape the miseries she had to endure, which were caused chiefly by my father, who cared little about his family.
The dreams were always there to brighten our lives a little. Only they came and went, beautiful while they lasted, but fragile and quick to vanish. They were like the soap bubbles we used to blow out of a clay pipe, sending them floating in the air above us in a gay, colourful procession, each one tantalising but elusive. When we reached up to seize one and to hold it in our hand, it burst at the slightest touch and disappeared. That is how our dreams were.
Take, for instance, the front parlour. For years and years, as long as we had lived in the house, the front room, intended to be a parlour, had remained empty, completely without furniture of any sort, simply because we could not afford to buy any. The fireplace had never been lit, and stood there cold and grey. But that wasn’t how it appeared in the dream my mother conjured up for us. It would, she promised, be warm and cosy, with red plush furniture, a luxurious divan and big, comfortable chairs. It would have a red plush carpet on the floor too, and on top of all that there would be a piano. Yes, a piano with black and white keys that we could all play on.
Oh, it was a wonderful dream, and we used to pretend it had already happened and we were lounging on the chairs, and my sister Rose stretched out on the divan. She, more than any of us, gave vent to a vivid imagination, playing the part of a duchess and giving commands to servants in a haughty tone, with an imaginary lorgnette held to her eyes.
Then what happened? My mother must have done a lot of soul searching and it must have cost her many a sleepless night before she reached her decision to do what Rose afterwards, in her bitterness, called treachery. But what else could my poor mother have done? She was struggling desperately to keep us all alive with the little money my father doled out to her every week from his pay as a tailor, keeping the bulk of it for his drinking and gambling. She had to do something to keep us from starving, so she turned the front room into a small shop where she sold faded fruits and vegetables scavenged from underneath the stalls in the market.
A common shop, no less, to break that beautiful bubble. My sister Rose never forgave her, and indeed the bitterness and resentment lasted a lifetime, and she hardly ever talked to my mother.
But that’s how our dreams were and it didn’t seem as if the really big one my mother had would be any different. This was the dream of going to America. This was the one my mother would never give up. It was the panacea for all her ills, the only hope she had left of a better life.
We had relatives there – not hers; she had none of her own, having been orphaned as a child in Poland, then passed from one unwilling and often unkind household to another until she was sixteen and able to make her way to England. They were my father’s relatives, his father and mother, and about ten brothers and sisters, a large brood of which he was the oldest.
At one time they too had lived in England, and in the very same house where we now lived, that whole family crowded into a house that was scarcely big enough for ours with only six children. No wonder they fought so often among themselves; it was for space, probably, they fought, although they fought with their neighbours as well. They were a noisy, unruly lot, I am told, and my father was the worst of them all when it came to battling. In fact, he terrorised his entire family with his loud voice and ready fists, and even my grandmother may have been afraid of him and she was pretty tough herself.
As for my grandfather, he played no part in any of this. He let my grandmother rule the house, which she did with iron fists except when it came to my father. But my grandfather managed to keep pretty much to himself. He was a roofer by trade and he was away often, mending slate roofs in distant towns and enjoying himself immensely. He would sing while he worked, songs of all nationalities, Jewish, Irish, English, Polish, and often draw a large, appreciative audience below.
In an old cardboard box where my mother used to keep an assortment of family photographs I once found a sepia photo of my father’s entire family, all of them ranged in three rows one behind the other, all dressed in their best clothes, smiling and looking like well-behaved, perfectly respectable children, and far from the ruffians that they were. In the centre sat the two parents, my grandmother heavy and double-chinned with a massive bosom and the glower on her face that was always there. Beside her sat my grandfather, a bearded and quite distinguished-looking gentleman holding a silver-knobbed cane between his legs, wearing a frock coat.
My father was not on that photograph and for a very good reason. He was not there. He was still in Poland.
The story, I have always felt, was somewhat apocryphal, yet older members of the family swear to its truth. At seven years of age my father had been put to work in a slaughterhouse, where he cleared up the remains of the animals that had b
een slaughtered for butchering. He worked twelve and sometimes more hours a day. At nine he started to drink. At ten he was defying my grandmother and was a terror to all of them. He could not be handled. So one day while he was at work my grandmother gathered up the rest of her family and together with my grandfather they all fled to England, leaving my father to fend for himself. When he got home and found them gone he almost went mad with rage. He followed them, however, and after many difficult weeks of travel finally got to England. He arrived at our street in the middle of the night. He had learned from other Jewish people where they lived, and he banged on the door and demanded to be let in.
My grandmother was awakened along with the rest of the household. Peering down from her bedroom window and seeing who it was, she went to get the bucket that stood on the landing and was used as a toilet for the night. It was full to the brim. She carried it to the open window and poured it down on his head. He let out a yell of rage, but refused to give up and kept banging on the door until she was forced to let him in.
So now it was the same thing all over again, except that he was vengeful and more dangerous than ever, and my grandmother racked her brain for another means of getting rid of him. It was at this time, so the story goes, that my mother arrived in England and straight into the hands of my grandmother, who immediately saw the solution to her problem in this sweet, innocent young orphaned girl, who had no friends, no relatives, nobody in the world to turn to. It was not hard to promote the match between her and my father, so my mother, knowing nothing about him, fell into the trap of a marriage that brought her nothing but misery for the rest of her life.
That wasn’t the end of the story. No sooner had this marriage taken place than my grandmother lost no time in putting as much distance as she could between her and her oldest son. Once again she packed her things, gathered her brood together and took them off to America, and out of the goodness of her heart she arranged with the landlord for the newly married couple to take over her house.
In view of all this it would seem utterly useless for my mother to appeal to my grandmother – her, especially – and others in that family for help in coming to America. Twice they had fled from my father. What chance was there that they would spend their money to buy the steamship tickets that she always asked for and that would bring him back into their lives?
Yet, knowing this, knowing the terrible story of how they had abandoned him in Poland and the suspicion that it had been something similar when they went to America, my mother wrote to all of them just the same. By this time the children were grown up, and most of them were married and out of my grandmother’s house, so there were many letters to write.
She could not write herself, since she had never gone to school; she dictated them to one of us and through all the years this had been going on the job was handed down from one to the other as we grew up, until finally it came to me, and I was the one who sat down opposite her at the table in the kitchen and dipped my pen in the ink bottle and waited while she thought of what to say.
At last she began: ‘My dear—’ – whoever this was being written to – ‘just a few lines to let you know we are all well and hoping to hear the same from you –’
Her letters always began this way and eventually after a few words of gossip about the old street – how Mrs Cohen had had another baby, how this one across the street had been sick, how that one … – she would finally launch into her plea for the tickets. She never said money. She could not bear the thought of taking money from anyone. But tickets, the steamship tickets, seemed better, and she would always reassure them that they would be paid for once we got to America and started working there.
They did not always answer. Sometimes weeks would go by and no letter came from America. The postman knew all about us and what we were expecting. Well, the whole street knew, but the postman especially. He was an elderly man with white hair sticking out from under his peaked hat, and he limped from a wounded leg he had got in the Boer War. He’d see me waiting at the front door while he limped his way down the street with his bag slung over one shoulder, and shake his head before he got to me and say, ‘Not today, lad. Better luck tomorrow.’
We did get a letter from Uncle Abe. And it was an excited, jubilant letter. He wrote telling us how well he was doing. He had three suits of clothing hanging in his closet and … in the excitement his words got twisted a little and it came out: ‘I have a beautiful home and a wife with electric lights and a bathtub …’
It was good for a laugh, but what about the tickets we’d asked him for? Nor did any of the others mention them. And as for my grandmother, the one letter she wrote in several years had a caustic touch. ‘What do you think I am,’ she asked, ‘the Bank of England? Or do you think I took the crown jewels with me when I left England? …’
With all this you’d think my mother would get discouraged and give up writing letters. But that did not happen, and I don’t know how many letters I wrote between the time I started, which would have been when I was about nine or ten, until I was twelve. And then, one morning, while we were all seated round the table at breakfast, there was a loud knocking at the front door.
‘Go and see who it is,’ my mother said, addressing no one in particular. She was too busy herself serving the breakfast and trying to feed the baby, who was propped up in an improvised high chair made from an ordinary chair plus a wooden box and a strap.
For a while none of us seemed to have heard her. It was probably a Jewish holiday of some sort for we were all home and my father was still upstairs sleeping. We were not only busy eating, but also reading, with our books and magazines propped up in front of us against the sugar bowl or the milk jug or even the loaf of bread or whatever support we could find. This was a regular practice of ours at mealtimes. But the lack of response to my mother’s request could have been due to something else. Despite the absorption in our reading it could have been the thought that the knock might be from a customer and that would have been a good reason to ignore it. We hated customers, along with the shop, still not realising that it represented our very lifeblood.
And then my eyes lifted from the Treasure Island that I was reading, and my mother’s eyes caught mine and she said, ‘You go, Harry.’
I got up reluctantly and went to the front door.
Chapter Two
IT WAS NOT a customer. It was the postman. He was standing outside with his bag slung over a shoulder and a grin on his face when he saw me. He was holding out a long, thick envelope. ‘All for you, lad,’ he said. ‘Sorry it isn’t America. Maybe next time.’
I took it from him and closed the door, wondering what could be in it. Yes, I was sorry it was not from America. A big thick envelope like that could very well have had tickets inside and my heart had given a bit of a thump when I first saw it in his hand. But the postmark on this one was Manchester and the return address gave the name of a travel agency there. It was addressed to the Bernsteins, no first name, simply the Bernsteins, and I was tempted to open it right then and there. However, I hurried in to give it to my mother.
Looking up from thrusting a spoonful of porridge into the baby’s mouth, she too gave a start when she first saw it, probably thinking the same thing I had. But when I told her it was from Manchester the light that had sprung up in her face died out and she said, ‘It’s probably an advertisement. Put it down and I’ll look at it later.’
‘Maybe it’s something important,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to open it now?’
‘No, later,’ she said and went back to feeding the baby.
But my curiosity was too great for me to be put off. ‘Can I open it?’ I asked.
Impatiently she said, ‘All right, open it if you want.’
I did. I opened the envelope, saw what was inside and the next moment I was yelling, ‘It’s the tickets!’
At the table the three of them looked up from their books. My mother stared at me with the spoon motionless in her hand. I’m not sure that she b
elieved me. I don’t think the others did either. But I was taking them out of the envelope. They were pink. Each had a name on it. There was one for each of us. There was the name of the boat we were to travel on: the SS Regina. There was the date: 22 June 1922. The departure: Liverpool. The destination: Quebec, Canada.
I kept taking them out of the envelope and all the time I was yelling, and soon the others left the table and rushed over to see the tickets and to grab them out of my hand, and they too started yelling, and my mother stood transfixed, not believing what she was hearing and seeing, she too taking one of the tickets from me and staring at it, unable to speak.
How does one feel when a dream comes true? When the bubble you grasp in your hand does not burst but remains there intact, as beautiful and rose-coloured as it was floating in the air? What does one say? My mother said nothing at first, nothing at all, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears, so deep was the emotion I saw surging through her.
There were other things in that envelope that we would have to look at. There was a long letter from the travel agency giving us a mountain of instructions for packing, passports, photographs that would be necessary, vaccinations, but all of this could wait for later when we had sobered up from that first moment’s intoxication. The house was a bedlam with our shouts and yells of joy, and the baby crying from fright.
Then suddenly there was a voice saying roughly, ‘What the bloody ’ell’s going on here?’
It was my father. He had come downstairs and into the kitchen without our noticing, and at once there was silence, save for the crying of the baby. Nobody dared move or say anything, all of us aware that we had broken the rule of maintaining absolute quiet in the house so long as he slept upstairs. His face was dark with anger and he was obviously in the kind of mood that such noisy awakenings could bring on.
My mother had picked up the baby and was rocking him back and forth in an attempt to quiet him. ‘We forgot you were sleeping,’ she said. ‘But we couldn’t help it. The tickets have come.’
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