The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  The rabbi tried to look properly impressed. I am sure he was not deceived, but he was polite, nodding and saying, “Ah, yes. It must be very interesting to work for a place like that.”

  But then the whole effect for Rose was spoiled as my father gave a sudden, ugly little laugh, and said, “It’s just a bloody shop like any other shop, except they charge ten times more and give their workers ten times less than any other shop. They’re just a bloody bunch of cutthroats, and for the few farthings a week she gets from them she’d be better off staying at home.”

  Rose’s face froze. She sat for a moment saying nothing. Then, suddenly, abruptly, pushing her chair back with a familiar scraping sound so like his, she left the table. A few moments later we heard the door bang as she went out of the house. It was not the first time she had departed like this after a quarrel. She would wander about a bit in the dark by herself, perhaps near the park, among the houses that were lit now, many of them, with the new electric lights, and then she would return and go silently upstairs to bed.

  There was a brief, awkward silence after her departure, before my mother started to apologize. The rabbi dismissed it with a wave of a hand, and said gently, “She is very young. She has a lot of pride, and there is nothing wrong with that. We are a proud people. Pride has always been a characteristic of the Jews. Someday we will really have something to be proud of, a nation of our own. What do you think?”

  He addressed this last question to Lily, who had been helping my mother serve, and had just placed another dish in front of the rabbi. He had turned his head and spoken to her over his shoulder. It was the first time, too, that he had spoken to her since the greeting, though I know his eyes had been following her as she moved about the kitchen, bringing the food to the table, and taking dishes back into the scullery.

  Lily, silent all this time, and evidently still hostile to the visitor, answered him rather loudly, and with an abruptness and vindictiveness that startled us and brought a worried frown to my mother’s forehead. “I’d rather not think of it, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “Why?” The rabbi looked a bit astonished. “Don’t you want a homeland for the Jews?”

  “There are too many nations already,” Lily retorted. “What do we need another one for—to divide the working class still more? The enemy of the Jews is not the Christians, it’s the bosses. Instead of running away, they should stay here and fight with their fellow workers for the freedom they want. Anti-Semitism comes out of the system, like all the other evils, poverty and hunger and war and disease. If you destroy the system you destroy all those things.”

  We all looked at her in amazement. Where had all this come from? We had never heard her say anything like this before. I myself didn’t understand half of what she was saying, with such passion, with eyes flashing. I could see the horror on my mother’s face, though, and noticed that even my father was staring at Lily with something like incredulity in his eyes. I knew then that Lily had said something awful.

  The rabbi himself was nodding and smiling a little, almost as if in agreement. “Ah,” he murmured, “then you are a Socialist. But so was I. I was even a member of the Bolshevik Party. I thought as you did, that if you got to the root of the evil—capitalism, the czar—and the workers took control, then everything would be all right, for the Jews especially. But I found out differently. When the revolution was over, when the fighting had stopped and the workers were in control—Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky first, of course—things would be all right for the Jews. I was soon disillusioned. The Jews, I discovered, were still regarded as Jews. Not wanted, no more welcome than they were under the czar, perhaps persecuted even more, because the lust for blood had been sharpened by the revolution. With the whole country still in turmoil, new scapegoats were needed, and there we were, the always ready-at-hand scapegoat. If I had not run away, I would have been killed. Many of my friends were, and mind you, this was after the revolution was over. Now, tell me, Lily, what do you have to say about that?”

  “I say you are a liar!” Lily flashed back at him.

  I heard my mother gasp. I heard her say, “Lily!” and even make a move as if to strike her.

  The rabbi intervened, holding up a hand, “No, no, no,” he said. “Let her speak. It is good for her, and for all of us. I am not a liar, Lily. I have no reason to lie. Believe me, I have no reason to feel any love or loyalty to the czar and everything that he represented. No one could have been more overjoyed than I was when he was overthrown. I could never forget how we suffered under his rule, the persecution, the pogroms. My father was killed in one of them. I saw him get killed, Lily, with my own eyes when I was a little boy. They came in the middle of the night, the czar’s Cossacks. They burned our houses and the synagogue and they took the men out and shot them, and the women and the young girls, they raped. I went through all this, so why shouldn’t I want to see a revolution come about and the workers in control? But I swear it did not change things for me and for my fellow Jews. That, I swear to.”

  “They turned on you,” said Lily, “not because you were a Jew, but because you were a rabbi, just as they turned on priests and ministers. You represented an institution that has always supported the capitalist powers and that has been used by them to keep the workers subdued. You were one of the evils that they had to get rid of.”

  The rabbi shook his head sadly. “Religion is the opiate of the people,” he quoted. “You see, I have read my Marx too, But do you know, Marx himself was an anti-Semite. If you read him as closely as I have you will find it in his own writings.”

  “Oh, what bosh!” cried Lily. “What a lie! If anyone can say a thing like that, then he is truly a liar.”

  “I will find the passages for you,” the rabbi said, smiling. “I will be glad to point them out to you, but not tonight. I think I have spoiled the Shabbos enough for you already.” He spoke this last to my mother, and had begun rising. “I apologize.”

  “It’s not your fault,” my mother cried. “It was Lily’s. She had no right to talk to you like that. She should be the one to apologize.”

  “No, no. Lily was just speaking her mind. She is a thinker, and I admire her all the more for it.”

  He left, and we were all silent for a moment after he had gone. My father broke the silence by rising abruptly, going to the scullery door, and getting his coat, and by putting it half on, and then striding out with the sleeve dangling behind him and his right arm groping for it. The front door slammed shut after him.

  His abrupt departure only added to my mother’s distress. His presence tonight had given her so much to hope for, but all that had been crushed in this moment. Things were just as before. Except with Lily. There was something new in what Lily had revealed tonight that frightened her.

  When he had gone, and the house was silent again, she turned on Lily and asked in a low voice, “Are you really a Socialist?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Lily.

  A little groan escaped my mother, and she put her hands to her face. What could be more horrible? Was there anything worse than being a Socialist? And was this the meaning of all those strange books she had been reading, and those strange meetings and lectures? I know what other thought was in my mother’s mind that night and probably keeping her awake all night. What other secrets was Lily hiding?

  Chapter Ten

  WE WERE ALL GROWING UP. FAST, VERY FAST. ONLY TWO OF US WERE NOW going to school, Saul and myself. We went separately, by ourselves or with our friends. There was no need any longer for my mother to fear that we would be attacked by the ragamuffins. We were big and able to take care of ourselves.

  I was eleven and the tallest boy in Cocky Rawlings’s standard five class. Saul was still a bit taller than I, and Joe an inch or so taller than Saul, so that we made steps and stairs when we stood together or when we walked off to the synagogue together. There was even less room in the bed now for all three of us, but we had to manage, with a great deal of kicking and shoving during the ni
ght.

  Joe had left school and been bar mitzvahed already. He went into the tailoring shop to work next to Lily and my father, but had his heart set on becoming a journalist, and my mother encouraged him. He had such beautiful handwriting, she boasted to all the women in her shop. For this reason alone he should be working for a newspaper instead of learning the tailoring trade, and she continued to urge him to write to newspapers for a job.

  At last, unbelievably, one answer came out of all the letters he’d written. It was from a big newspaper in Manchester, asking him to appear for an interview. There was such joy among us. It was almost as if he had the job already.

  The day he went for his interview was an exciting one. He put on his best suit, a blue serge with the first pair of long trousers he’d ever worn, bought for his bar mitzvah. He had a vest with it, too, and wore one of my father’s stiff collars and ties. He came downstairs to show us and my mother’s face glowed with pride.

  “Oh, you look so beautiful,” she said. “How can they help but give you the job?”

  He was a handsome boy, there had never been any question of that, and it had been growing more and more noticeable as he got older. Girls had already begun pestering him with invitations, and he had gone to party after party. That morning he looked his very best, and much older than his years. Lately, since working in the shop, he had begun to sport a cane and wear a monocle. He wanted to take these with him to the interview, and there was some arguing between him and my mother before she got him to give up the idea.

  Then off he went, strutting confidently down Brook Street, on his way to Mersey Square and the tram that would take him to Manchester. He looked almost as if he might be carrying the cane, swinging it about with the monocle screwed in his eye, as I had seen him do when I had once come upon him and a friend of his in the park, saying, “By jove, by jove!”

  We waited. My mother was holding her breath. Was this to be the first lucky step toward good fortune? Every time there was a sound at the front she jumped up. The hours passed. It was evening, and still he had not come home.

  “He must be working,” she said. “They must have given him the job. He’s a journalist!”

  It was right after tea that he came home. We saw him coming along Brook Street, and from the distance it was clear to us that he was walking very slowly. And that there was something wrong. We all stood outside watching him, clustered together anxiously, the concern growing as he came closer.

  Now it was obvious that there was something very, very wrong. His clothes seemed torn, his stiff collar was hanging off his neck, and the tie was dangling down all askew. One sleeve on his fine blue serge suit seemed to be ripped and his face…

  His face was battered, and he was crying. The sick feeling must have settled deep inside my mother, and in all of us. I heard my mother whisper, “Oh, my God,” before she put an arm around him and led him inside. We followed, and there he broke down completely, sank into a chair, and burst into bitter sobs. His story came out gradually, bit by bit, with intermittent sobbing in between the words.

  He had gone to Manchester, and had come to the newspaper office, a big place with a lot of roaring machinery somewhere in the building. The girl at the reception desk had taken his name, and that of the man he wanted to see, and then told him to wait. So he sat on a bench and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. Other people came and went, but he seemed to have been totally forgotten. Employees went out to lunch, but he remained sitting there. He was hungry, and the stiff collar dug into his neck and hurt, but he was afraid to loosen it for fear he might be called in any minute. He had to wait still longer, much longer, though, and it was not until mid-afternoon, when he had begun to feel that he could not take any more of it, that the girl finally told him to go in.

  He went into an office where a heavyset, white-haired man with a bulbous nose sat at a large desk, and the first thing the man said to him as he sat down was, “You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “Well, I can tell you right now you aren’t going to get a job on a newspaper. No newspaper will hire a Jew.” The man’s voice was slightly hoarse and he looked across the desk at Joe with bloodshot eyes. He wore no jacket and no collar and his shirt was open at the neck. The desk was cluttered with papers, and Joe kept hearing the rumbling of machinery. “I’m doing you a favor telling you this,” the man said. “I’m going to save you a lot of time and trouble writing letters. We’re a humanitarian country. We gave you people refuge when no other country would have you. But don’t take advantage of it and start pushing yourselves into places where you aren’t wanted. Stick to where you belong, in the tailoring shops and pawnshops and the markets. Remember that and you’ll be all right.”

  “Is that what he called you in for?” my mother asked in a whisper. “Just to say that?”

  “Yes.”

  I saw my mother clench her hands and compress her lips. She couldn’t speak for a long time.

  That, though, clearly wasn’t all of Joe’s misfortune that day. Coming off the tram at Mersey Square, sick with despair and disappointment and hunger—he hadn’t eaten all day—he made his way slowly across the square and crossed onto Daw Bank and then under the viaduct. Just as he was passing the Devil’s Steps it began—the jeering and laughing voices, familiar sounds and words, Jew, Kike, vansquashers, who killed Christ?

  Joe had always been more afraid than any of us, and not much of a fighter, but he had never been caught like this alone, and in his best clothes. He was terrified. Then he made the mistake that we had always been warned against—he started to run—and it acted on them as it would a pack of wild dogs. The next moment they were on him. There were about six of them, and he went down under all of them, screaming. They pummeled him mercilessly and ripped his clothes, until finally a man coming out of the pub under the viaduct came to his rescue and chased them off.

  Joe stumbled away, crying, his face bloodied, his fine blue serge suit in rags.

  Yes, we were all growing up. When school broke up for the summer holiday that year, I was all done with Cocky Rawlings’s class and ready for Miss Penn’s standard six. The headmaster had talked to me about becoming ink monitor and studying for the scholarship exam.

  “You’re not as bright as your sister was,” he said, looking down at me from the tall desk where he sat. “But you’re about the best of the lot here, which isn’t saying much, because most of ’em have the brains of donkeys. But at least you know how many thripenny doughnuts there are in a dozen.” He winked, but kept his face looking severe, and the red ears stuck out. He gave them a little wiggle and went on without changing expression. “You might talk to your mother about it and see whether she’d want it or not. I wouldn’t care to have the same thing happen as did with Lily. You talk to her and let me know.”

  There was no hesitation on her part when I told her. Her eyes lit up. A new hope, a new dream came into her mind. This would make up for the last disappointment with Joe, for all her disappointments. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Tell him yes. He mustn’t worry. What happened to Lily won’t happen to you. They’are all working now, and we’ll be able to manage.” But then a slight hesitation came over her, and she lowered her voice and said, “But don’t tell your father. We won’t say anything to him about it yet.”

  There was hardly any need for her to say that. I never talked to him, nor he to me. I recall one time coming home from the library with a stack of books under my arm, I almost ran into him as he was coming out of a pub called the Red Lion on King Street. We both started and stopped short. We both looked at each other for a moment, then dropped our heads. Not a word was spoken. He seemed to be fumbling in his pocket for something, and I thought perhaps he was going to give me a penny. But no, if he was he changed his mind abruptly, and with a little muttered sound charged past me, almost shouldering me aside.

  I didn’t care. I was used to him by now. He had seemed to change a little after the baby was born, and ha
d spent a little more time at home, and had even shown some interest in the baby, peering down at it in the crib with a cigarette smoking in his mouth. Now he was the same as he had been, coming and going, ignoring us all, except for a look at the baby now and then.

  I went on my way that afternoon not thinking of him. The summer weather had begun. The skies were clear and the sun shone, baking warmth into the cobblestones and narrow sidewalks that ran along both sides of our street. We felt the warmth in the evening as we raced up and down the street, often barefooted at this time of the year.

  I was not like Lily. When I was told about the scholarship exam I would be taking I did not start burying myself in books. I rushed outside to play as soon as tea was over. I was no longer one of the smaller boys hanging on the fringes of the group. I was one of the big boys. Zalmon, my brothers Joe and Saul, and a few others had left the group, too old to be playing in the street. They were workers now in the tailoring shops, bent over their machines all day, coming home to eat their dinner and then go out to a picture show or to walk through the park with a girl.

  I was one of the older boys now, one of the leaders of the group, along with Philly Cohen and Benny Mittleman, and on a summer night we led a group of smaller boys down to the rec to play a game of piggy stick. It was the one game you couldn’t play on the street; we’d tried it and smashed too many windows, and it had been forbidden.

  On the rec, though, there was plenty of room. We headed for it that night in a noisy, chattering group, carrying our sticks and piggies. I had made my own, spending hours whittling the little piece of wood into the shape of a pig’s snout on each end. It was one of my most treasured possessions, and I clutched it tightly as we went down to Wood Street, turned left onto Wood Street, and went past the Gordons’ taproom. The door was opened by a customer just then and I caught a glimpse of Florrie inside standing behind the bar, with her face flushed and her hair all stringy and hanging loose. She was not half as attractive as she used to be, and and had grown heavy and careless with her appearance since Freddy had died.