Read­ing The Invis­i­ble Wall is like hav­ing a grand­fa­ther spend sev­er­al relaxed evenings entranc­ing you with the sto­ry of his child­hood. This debut mem­oir, writ­ten by Har­ry Bern­stein at the spry age of 93, is at once a deeply per­son­al mem­oir, a his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, and a love sto­ry. With won­der­ful­ly read­able lan­guage, Bern­stein brings to life the col­or­ful char­ac­ters who inhab­it­ed one street in a small Eng­lish mill town just before and dur­ing World War I.

The title refers to an invis­i­ble, but no less tan­gi­ble divi­sion between Jews who live on one side of the street and the non-Jews who live on the oth­er. But if two peo­ple on oppo­site sides of a wall touch the wall, instead of act­ing as a sep­a­ra­tor, it is a con­nec­tor.

And so it hap­pens, that the peo­ple who live on either side of the sep­a­rat­ed street are in fact inex­tri­ca­bly bound togeth­er. As the tri­als and dev­as­ta­tion of world war make their way along the street, neigh­bors find pro­found con­nec­tions they nev­er knew they had. Bern­stein takes the read­er on a pow­er­ful jour­ney through a book in which empha­sis in the title shifts from Wall to Invis­i­ble.