Harry Bernstein, memoirist who wrote of childhood of deprivation, dies at 101

Harry Bernstein, who caused a literary sensation when he emerged from anonymity in his 90s to write two devastating memoirs that explored his childhood of squalor, abuse and anti-Semitism, died June 3 at his daughter’s home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 101. The cause of death was not reported.

Mr. Bernstein, a trade magazine editor for much of his career, attracted widespread critical praise when, at 96, he published “The Invisible Wall.” In unsparing detail, the book recounted his childhood in the Jewish ghetto of a squalid English mill town near Manchester.

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His parents, uneducated immigrants who fled pogroms in Poland, raised a family of seven children in desperate poverty. Far from being sentimental about the immigrant experience, Mr. Bernstein focused on the anti-Semitism they and their Jewish neighbors faced every day.

Christian children routinely beat up Jewish children while yelling, “Who killed Christ? Bloody Jews.” Likewise, he recalled the Jewish children being instructed to spit when they walked past a church.

In this atmosphere of mutual contempt, Mr. Bernstein's older sister Lily fell in love with a Christian man, Arthur Forshaw, the son of a shopkeeper. The courtship was conducted in secret, for, as Mr. Bernstein wrote, an “invisible wall” existed between the Christian and Jewish neighborhoods.

In Mr. Bernstein’s own family, the news of the marriage was met with horror. His mother, Ada, dressed in black and insisted that the family sit shiva, the Jewish ceremony of mourning, as if Lily had died. Mother and daughter reconciled after Lily had a child.

Throughout the book, Mr. Bernstein’s father emerges as the chief villain. He held a steady job as a tailor in England, but his heavy drinking and tyrannical outbursts created an atmosphere of constant fear.

When 12-year-old Lily gained entrance to a prestigious grammar school, the father raged about having had to work in a slaughterhouse as a child and told her she would have to earn her keep by laboring with him in the tailor shop.

He “grabbed hold of Lily’s arm,” Mr. Bernstein wrote, “and then with the other hand he twisted her beautiful hair into a rope and pulled on it, now with both hands, and Lily, screaming and still trying to resist, was pulled along.

“My mother, sobbing hysterically, stood in the doorway with her hands over her eyes, and we were around her crying too. For a long time we could hear Lily’s screams as she was dragged through the streets by the rope of her hair, and her voice coming to us clearly, screaming, ‘I won’t go! I won’t go!’ ”

“The Invisible Wall” drew favorable comparisons to Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angela’s Ashes,” about that author’s hardscrabble upbringing in Ireland. Reviewing “The Invisible Wall” in the New York Times, William Grimes called it “a world of pain and prejudice, evoked in spare, restrained prose that brilliantly illuminates a time, a place and a family struggling valiantly to beat impossible odds.”

In “The Dream,” Mr. Bernstein’s follow-up memoir, he traced his family’s move to Chicago in 1922. In reviews, critics described Mr. Bernstein as a storyteller of quiet, heartbreaking power.