In his memoir The Invisible Wall, Harry Bernstein tells of growing up Jewish in a World War I—era northern English town.
Why wait until your 90s to write a memoir about your boyhood?
I turned to writing this book, after my wife died, about four years ago. As you get older, you have less of a present and no future, because there just isn't one—and you start to live more and more in your past. That's all you really have. I had always been trying to write a long-form book—a novel or a piece of nonfiction—and you could call me a late-bloomer, but when I started thinking about my childhood, I discovered that all the memories were there and I just started writing them down.
So this isn't your first shot at writing?
Oh, no. I've been writing, semiprofessionally, for a long time. I've really been writing all my life. I started out at 11 years old as editor of a publication called Gossip. There was one copy; it was one page. Over the years I've written profiles about my experiences in England and as a young man immigrating to the U.S., in various Jewish journals and other publications. I've written for major publications, and in Newsweek just recently. So, sure, this is the first book I've published. But it isn't the first book I've written.
Why did you choose to write the book from the perspective of yourself as a boy, and not from your current perspective, one that knows how things will turn out?
Trial and error, really. But I just found this way to be the best way to access the reality of the experiences, to re-enter those events as they really happened to me. And in doing so, I rediscovered my role in a lot of the events that I recount and I really reconnected to those memories.
Did you enjoy the process—revisiting your past and writing about it in a memoir?
Oh, very much so. Once I sat down and started writing, it came out quite easily. It began as a gesture to keep myself company at this late stage in life. But I've found it to be quite a joy. I'm almost half done with another book that begins when my family arrives in America. I feel like if I lived 10 more years, I would write a whole lot more of these. Not that I imagine I will—but I feel capable of it.
