What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [20]
Soon, World War I announced itself to the street. “The telegram girl would come and bring with her this dreadful envelope with black borders that the War Department sent. She would come whistling a merry song. People would come out and stand with hands on their hearts. Everyone, Jew and Christian, would rush to comfort the unlucky one,” he said.
Romance occasionally flowered despite the invisible wall, and on two occasions Harry played the role of innocent go-between. The first time, he carried notes between a neighboring Jewish girl and a Christian boy. When they were found out, the girl’s father beat her and banished her to Australia. The second affair was a scandal for Harry’s family and provides the sad climax of The Invisible Wall. Harry keeps secret the relationship between his brilliant older sister Lily and Arthur Foreshaw, the intelligent, idealistic Christian boy from across the street. Arthur had helped prepare Lily for a scholarship exam and, on occasion, saved Harry and his siblings from anti-Semitic bullies who tormented the Jewish children as they walked home from school. When Arthur survived World War I and returned, the first thing he did was walk across the street to call on Lily. Blinded by religion, Harry’s mother sent Arthur away. Doing so, however, did little to stop the young lovers.
Defying her family, Lily married Arthur in a civil ceremony and brought Harry along as the family’s sole witness. When Harry reported the event at home, his mother declared her daughter dead and the family went into mourning, sitting shiva and mumbling prayers for seven days in a darkened room. Reconciliation would only come after Lily gave birth to a son. For Harry, who refused to have a bar mitzvah, the episode was the end of Judaism. “I think religion has done more damage and destruction to the world than any war,” he said.
It took a year for Harry to complete The Invisible Wall. He did not show it to anyone before he began sending it out to publishers in New York. He was cautiously hopeful. One after another, they returned their verdicts: “It’s too quiet.” The critique mystified Harry. “Too quiet? I still wonder, what the hell did they mean? What’s quiet about it?” He had almost given up hope when he read a newspaper article about the memoir of an English girl who had lived in Israel. He sent his book to the publisher, Random House U.K. For a year, it sat unread in a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts. “I wrote a couple of times, ‘Are you still interested?’ The editor who received it just scribbled back on my letter, ‘Yes, still interested. Unfortunately, it’s still on the pile.’ Still on the pile. Well, I knew what that meant,” Harry said.
Impatient with the months of indecision, Harry hired an agent in England to get a definitive answer. Not long afterward, the agent reported back that the editor liked Harry’s book, just not enough to publish it. Instead, she was passing it along to a colleague, Kate Elton, publishing director at Arrow, a Random House imprint. Since the book arrived without a cover letter from an agent, “it had none of the overhyped pitch that you sometimes get with these things,” Elton told Motoko Rich of the New York Times. “I read it without knowing what I was getting at all.”
Elton read the manuscript in an afternoon in February 2006. She phoned Harry the next day and told him that she was about to make an offer. She wanted to know only whether to make it to him or to his agent. Elton offered five thousand pounds—about nine thousand dollars at the time. “It was almost embarrassingly small, but I was happy to have a serious publisher. So, it all started,” he said.
Praise for The Invisible Wall was immediate. As encouragement poured in, Harry felt impelled to begin a second