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By Root 1316 0

the two sides of the street had little in common. There were the summer nights the residents of the street brought out chairs and sat in front of their houses to share the music coming from the only gramophone. And there was the shared fear of the landlord. “If you couldn’t pay the rent, you would be put out in short order or sent to the workhouse. It was very Dickensian,” Harry recalled. “The landlord would always come on Sunday, carrying a notebook and a sharp pencil, because he knew the Christians would be home and so would the Jews. When they heard the first rapping at the door, panic spread through the street as families began frantically searching for a few coppers. I think our rent was about a shilling a month. Once, my mother ran to the mantel and looked under the oilcloth for some coins but found nothing. So she told me to run to my friend Philly’s house to borrow money from his mother. I ran as fast as I could. About halfway, I ran into Philly, who was running the other way. We looked at each other. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘I’m going to your house to borrow some money for the rent from your mother.’ I said, ‘I’m going to your house for the same thing.’ I don’t think we understood quite because we said, ‘Well, I’ll see you later, ta-ta.’ And off he went to my mother and I to his. They say great comedy comes of great tragedy, but I assure you there wasn’t anything funny about it.”

Born in 1910 (his birthday was celebrated on April 17, but his birth certificate reads May 30), Harry was the fifth of six children whose parents emigrated from Poland. His father, Yankel, was a tailor in a local sweatshop. In his book, Harry portrays his father unflinchingly as a gambler, a drunk, and a bully—one who dragged Harry’s older sister down the street to work in the sweatshop instead of allowing her to accept a scholarship to a prestigious school. There was no mystery to what lay behind his father’s temperament. Sent to work when he was five and abused by his various masters, he was a monstrously violent drunk by age twelve. According to family lore, one day after Yankel left for work, his parents stripped their house of its furnishings, fled from their son, and moved to England.

On discovering that his family had abandoned him, Yankel bashed his head against a wall until he needed to be hospitalized. After he was released, he worked his way across Europe and tracked down his family in Stockport. When he banged on the door in the middle of the night and demanded to be let in, his mother, Sarah, dumped a latrine bucket on his head. Yankel caused such a disturbance that the family eventually did let him in and soon he was terrorizing them once again. At about the same time, an innocent sixteen-year-old orphan named Ada arrived from Poland to stay with a family friend. It immediately occurred to Sarah Bernstein that she was the solution to the problem with Yankel. She bamboozled Ada, filling her with lies about a suitor and inveigling a match that placed Ada in the clutches of misery for the rest of her life. The rest of the Bernsteins promptly disembarked for Chicago, leaving Yankel and his new wife behind.

Harry’s family lived a penurious existence, surviving for many years on pocket change his father doled out to his mother on Saturday nights before he left for the pub. Meanwhile, Ada sowed her children’s heads with dreams: new shoes to ensure Harry’s admission to a fine school, the marriage of her daughter to a rabbi, tickets for all to go to America. She also promised that one day they would turn the empty front room into a real parlor, with plush furniture and a piano. But time and again poverty would crush her hopes. Desperate to earn extra money to feed and clothe her five children, she crawled under a fruit seller’s stand one day, as Harry watched, to retrieve fallen fruit. “When she crawled back out, she had the slime of rotten fruit smeared all over her clothes and even her lovely head,” he told me. The vendor refused to take more than a few shillings for the bruised fruit Ada had retrieved. And with