"The Invisible Wall." Harry Bernstein

BRICK, N.J. — Harry Bernstein had been married for 67 years when his wife, Ruby, died in 2002. He was so lost without her, he considered killing himself, or, as he puts it, "I wished I could join Ruby" and gave "serious thought to ways and means of doing it."

Instead, he started writing, taking refuge from the present in the past, mining memories of a bittersweet childhood in an English mill town blighted by poverty in the years surrounding World War I.

His memoir, The Invisible Wall, will be released today in the USA. It won rave reviews last month in Britain ("An exceptional book on several levels," The Guardian said) and is getting good notices here. (It "takes on the heft of a historical novel with stirring success," Publishers Weekly said.)

Both the book and author are remarkable stories, and not just because he's 96, living quietly in a New Jersey retirement community and at work on a sequel.

The Invisible Wall is a family history driven by a loving, self-sacrificing mother and a hard-drinking brute of a father. It invites comparisons to Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's 1996 best seller about his childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland.

Bernstein's title comes from a self-imposed divide on his childhood street in the slums of Stockport, near Manchester: Christians on one side, and Jews, like himself, on the other.

"The one thing the two sides of our street had in common was poverty," Bernstein writes. "When the landlord came to collect his shilling rent on Sunday afternoon, there was panic on both sides."

These days, Bernstein lives in a modest but comfortable two-bedroom house filled with a dozen photos of his late wife.

Other photos show Bernstein's mother and her six children. "All are dead now but me," says Bernstein, a survivor to tell their story.

The book is about bigotry that mirrored itself on both sides of his childhood street. He feared attacks from Christian bullies who taunted, "Bloody Jews. Who killed Christ?"

Jews like his mother, Ada, no matter how poor, thought themselves better than their Christian neighbors.

Bernstein was 12 when his family emigrated to Chicago in 1922. By then, he had played the role of innocent go-between in two romances that attempted to bridge the wall.

In one, Harry carried messages between a Christian boy and a Jewish girl. When their romance was discovered, her father beat her and banished her to Australia.

The other romance, which Harry kept a secret, involved Bernstein's older sister Lily. When she defied her parents and married a Christian from the other side of the street, Bernstein's mother sat shiva — the Jewish ceremony of mourning — for a daughter she had declared dead. Only after the birth of a grandchild did the mother and daughter reconcile.

The book also is a portrait of a small street roughed up by the larger world. Boys from both sides of the block go off to World War I. One returns without his legs. Some never return. The rabbi's son runs off to join the Russian Revolution, to the father's everlasting shame.

Bernstein wrote a few of the stories in 1950 for The Jewish American Monthly titled "Twelve Years in an English Ghetto."

'I remember so much'

Only after his wife's death, at 91, did he expand: "I had this gap to fill. Writing was sort of therapy. When you're old, it seems you have no future. Where are you going to go? But I could go back to my past."

His book is built out of hundreds of small, vivid details. Bernstein says they came flooding back, triggered by old photographs. "I remember so much: the color of someone's dress, the expression on someone's face. I'm not saying every word is exactly as it was said. A memoir is an impression like a van Gogh painting."

At first, he had trouble finding a publisher. He says the initial response from agents and editors went like this: "The writing is good, but there's no market for it."

Eventually, his manuscript made its way to Kate Elton, an editor in the London offices of Random House, who says she immediately "fell in love with it."

An early — and late — bloomer

She was struck by "how little editing it needed. Usually a first book from an author, of any age, needs editing. But Harry wrote so beautifully and vividly about his characters that you feel you're with them in that street."

Bernstein always wanted to be a writer. At 11, he published his own newspaper, The Gossip, which reported neighborly everyday news. There was one copy, and readers took turns at a half-penny apiece.

Later, in New York, he worked as a scout for movie studios, reading manuscripts, and as editor of a trade magazine. He published short stories in small literary magazines. He wrote several novels and even got one published in 1981, The Smile, about an ambitious fashion model. As far as Bernstein knows, it sold one copy — or at least, he heard from one reader. He still has several copies in his bookcase.

Despite Bernstein's earlier novel, Random House is touting The Invisible Wall as a debut by a 96-year-old author.

"It makes for good publicity," he says. He's happy to be described as a "late bloomer."

He has two grown children and lives alone except for a housekeeper four hours a day. He uses a walker to get around and recently bought his first computer to exchange e-mail with his American and British editors.

He has been back to his old street only once. In 1960, he and his wife returned to find it was about to be demolished in a slum clearance.

Only one of his neighbors remained — from the Christian side of the street. She invited them in for tea. Her home looked exactly as his had, except for a crucifix.

His sequel will deal with his life after his family emigrated, in part to escape his father, who eventually found them.

At first, they joined relatives in Chicago, and for a while, life was good. Harry was the first in his family to go beyond seventh grade, although the Depression ended any thought of college. "We had come up in the world," he says. "We had electric lights and a toilet inside. Even a parlor with a piano." For his mother, "it was as high as we ever went. It was downhill from there."

The family moved to New York in the midst of the Depression, again to escape his father, who again followed.

His mother died at 65. "Looked 85," he says. It was the last time he saw his father: "He wept when she died. That's the only good thing I can say about him."

According to family history pieced together by Bernstein, his father went to work at the age of 5 in Poland and was a heavy drinker by 12 when his parents abandoned him. He never got over it.

If his father could read his book, Bernstein says, "he'd deny it all," including the devastating scene when he drags 12-year-old Lily off to work in a tailor shop.

She had just won a scholarship to continue her education. She never got over it.

His mother "would be so proud" of his book. "She would overlook the unpleasant parts, just as she did in life."

When Harry met Ruby

Harry met Ruby in New York, at a dance organized by the League Against War and Fascism — which, he notes, was a communist front. Not that he was a communist, "but they knew how to organize good social events."

He recalls, "I couldn't dance, but Ruby made me feel like I could."

After they were married, Bernstein found a job reading and summarizing manuscripts for movie studios at $5 a shot.

He recommended John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, "the sort of writing I wanted to do."

But much of what he read was "trash." He remembers late one Friday afternoon being given a thick manuscript and a Monday morning deadline.

"We had rented a cottage on Staten Island, and I was looking forward to the weekend, so I gave it the quick one-two. Said it was just another historical romance. There were dozens of them, more trash."

The book was Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Bernstein laughs and says, "I lost my job, but I did have that weekend off."

Eventually, he found a similar job with another studio.

A long road traveled

He has been retired since 1973 but suddenly has a new job: author. He proudly shows off encouraging e-mails from his editor at Random House, who has been reading his sequel, to be titled The Dream. It's a reference to the poverty and hardship his mother couldn't escape in America.

He figures he's about a month from finishing it. He's negotiating a contract and says, "I don't blame them for making sure I finish it. If they give me an option today, I could be gone tomorrow."

If he's not, he has an idea for yet another book, this one about his wife, to be titled Eulogy for Ruby— "if I live that long."