The Invisible Wall

When Harry Bernstein was born in an impoverished Lancashire mill town on May 30, 1910, most Europeans’ day-to-day lives had more in common with Londoners of Shakespeare’s time than with Americans of today.  And that’s really the first thing that hits you while reading this centenarian’s compelling memoir – or is it a novel? –  The Invisible Wall.  The story opens in 1914 on the eve of the First World War and runs through the early 1920s when the author and his family move to America.  It is a time before most people had indoor plumbing, garbage removal, electricity, cars, radios & televisions, or supermarkets.  Bernstein was born in the twilight years of the Gilded Age: on the other side of modern machine-based warfare, on the other side of the Russian Revolution, and on the other side of the violent and irrational ideologies that those two events spawned.  And yet this very different world existed within the lifetime of a still-living author.

             The main plot, however, centers around a phenomenon that is just as true today as it was then:  religion poisons everything.  (Shout out to the immortal Hitch.) The “invisible wall” of the book’s title refers to an imaginary boundary line that runs down the middle of a single street in a poor neighborhood – a wall that keeps the formerly Russian and Polish Jews on one side of the street and the Christians on the other.

The wall is strong but not impermeable.  On Friday nights, for example, the Jewish families hire a “fire goy” – a Christian neighbor who comes over and tends to their fireplaces.  Tending a fire was forbidden to Jews on the Shabbos.  Armistice Day, as another example, became an occasion for mingling and genuine good will between the two communities.  But on most days, for most people, religious bigotry was the order of the day.

            As a long oppressed minority, the Jews suffer the worst of it.  But the bigotry and fear of “the other” definitely run both ways.  And very intensely, it turns out.  When ‘arry’s oldest sister Lily falls in love with a Christian lad named Arthur, and worse, marries him in a secret secular ceremony, their mother is required by her religious faith to regard Lily as dead.  Not just disowned, which would be bad enough, but dead.  She actually goes into formal ritualized mourning, something called “sitting shiva,” which involves seven days of sitting and praying in a darkened room in her stocking feet.  Her Jewish neighbors, equally appalled by this horrifying turn of events, visit her in her mourning state as if comforting a woman whose daughter had been burned in the flames of the Spanish Inquisition.

            The birth of Lily and Arthur’s child, after some initial reluctance, finally brings a lukewarm reconciliation to the two families.  They even manage to throw a block party in celebration of the event.  This leads to a single day of reveling on which the two sides of the street find themselves drinking, dancing & socializing together.  Bernstein leaves no room for doubt, however, that all this happy-go-lucky getting along is short-lived.  In an epilogue, he describes his return to the neighborhood in the early 1960s.  Only one of his old neighbors is still living there.  In fact, the neighborhood is about to be bulldozed to make room for a new public housing project.  That neighbor, a Christian named Anna Greene, describes how, after ‘arry moved to America in 1922, not much really changed in the neighborhood.  The invisible wall continued to separate the neighbors into opposing communities of religious suspicion and fear.  

            If our age is more enlightened and tolerant, it is not easy to see.  At least the Jews and Christians on Harry Bernstein’s street were capable of kindness towards each other in dire circumstances.  Today’s newspapers are full of uninspiring examples of our intolerance:  preachers burning the Koran, right-wing evangelists pushing their faith on Jews at the Air Force Academy, demonstrations against Islamic Centers in New York, banning the burkha in France, and on and on.  Just this week, Time magazine offers a feature piece on an up and coming mega-church evangelical preacher who is teaching his flock to reject notions of eternal punishment and hell.  The responses of most right-wing Christians to his warmly titled book Love Wins have not been, shall we say, ecumenical.

Want to be really appalled?  Check out CNN’s documentary Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door: 

Once again, religion poisons everything.