Harry Bernstein Book order

Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century America, the story follows Harry Bernstein and his mother as they escape their challenging life in England for a brighter future. Their journey begins with a mysterious gift of steamship tickets, leading them to Chicago, where they initially enjoy newfound comforts. However, the Great Depression brings harsh challenges, revealing family secrets and dangers. Amidst the turmoil, Harry's love for Ruby emerges, offering hope and fulfillment, ultimately realizing his mother’s dreams of a better life.

On a narrow cobbled street in a northern mill town young Harry Bernstein and his family face a daily struggle to make ends meet. But the regular pleas to relatives in Chicago yield nothing, until one day, when Harry is twelve years old, the family looks on astonished as he opens a letter which contains the longed-for steamship tickets.

The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the "invisible wall" that ran down its center, dividing Jewish families on one side from Christian families on the other. On the eve of World War I, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. His father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. Harry's mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams: new shoes that might secure Harry's admission to a fancy school; that her daughter might marry the local rabbi; that the entire family might one day go to America. Then Harry's older sister does the unthinkable: she falls in love with a Christian boy from across the street.--From publisher description

Harry Bernstein was born into a world of hardship and suffering in a northern mill town, in the shadow of the First World War.