The Dream by Harry Bernstein

This follow-up memoir to The Invisible Wall chronicles the author's life as he moves from England to America with his family. It focuses on the idealized version of America many immigrants had post-World War I and how devastatingly quickly that dream was dashed during The Great Depression.

I like a memoir to have something of the unusual about it and The Dream was severely lacking in this department. Bernstein lives a life full of struggles common (unfortunately) to immigrant families in the 20's and 30's. Money is tight, jobs are impossible to find, dad is an alcoholic...it all read pretty predictably when you compare this one story to history. I even felt like events were foreshadowed in a style more akin to fiction - the set-up was all too perfect at times - that I never expected to see in a memoir.

Bernstein also relates stories in an overly-detailed manner. I felt like I was reading a diary at times of his day-to-day life. It was actually pretty boring.

To sum up the story, Bernstein, amidst all the trials of immigrating to the US post WWI finds love and lives an overall happy life. His siblings all struggle in different ways, but overcome too. The only sad character in the end is Bernstein's Mom, who suffers beyond the scope of The Great Depression, wanting only happiness and comfort for her children and dying before everything smooths out.

I would not recommend this book. I think you can find a more readable account of life during this time period if that's what you're looking for. I would suggest picking up The Invisible Wall though. It's an interesting story with enough unique elements to really make it an engaging memoir.

The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein

The Invisible Wall is an elaborately detailed memoir of a ninety-something-year-old man's recollections of a WWI era childhood in a small English town just outside of Manchester. It focuses in on one particular street where the poorer sect lived. On one side lived the Christians and on the other, the Jews. Their situations were almost identical yet a void existed between the two sides that was nearly impossible to cross. Both sides feared each other; neither liked things that were different from themselves. But, one love affair (at least temporarily) changed everything. Bernstein's vivid descriptions brings a street you come to know almost as well as your own comes together as one.

Bernstein's narrative begins long before the void-filling love affair actually takes place and relives all the significant events from his childhood memories from how his mother earned money to care for her family to the way his alcoholic father stormed out of the house each night. Bernstein introduces you to all his neighbors - on both sides of the street - and retells events significant in their lives too.

The memoir is so engaging and the story is so accessible that before you know it, you're living young Harry's life right beside him - saddened when he's denied admission to a better school because of his shoes (and his religion,) tearful when he witnesses the death of a war veteran, and heartened when he first becomes an uncle.

Additionally appealing is that this story is real. It's not some fictionalized tale about overcoming prejudices and uniting under the commonality of humanity. This is the childhood of one boy who saw both hate and love emanate from one tiny street, a microcosm of an entire "era" in our history.