These days the phone rings frequently in Harry Bernstein's house. A lot of people want to talk to him – newspaper reporters, magazine writers, TV personalities – they've all called or come to Brick Township to interview him. What they want to know, he told me as we sat at his kitchen table, is how a 96-year-old man could successfully write a memoir recalling events that happened 90 years ago. "The emphasis," he said a little ruefully, "is on the writer, not on the book."

What he wants to talk about is the book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers, which chronicles the first 12 years of his life growing up in a working-class English mill town.

The title refers to the figurative line dividing the street where he lived with his family – Christians on one side, Jews on the other, neighbors united only by their poverty and mutual hatred. "The book is a microcosm of the way we live today – walls everywhere – the Berlin Wall, the Chinese Wall, Israel's wall," Bernstein said. "They all represent some sort of bigotry, separating people when we should be more concerned with bringing people together."

The story Bernstein tells in his book is dramatic and poignant. He hated his father, a sullen, mean man who gambled and drank, and adored his mother, who struggled to provide for her six children, often starving herself so they could eat. "She was a victim of a tender heart. She married him not because she loved him but because grandmother arranged it. He told her of how he had been abused and she felt sorry for him. I have always felt a little bitter that my mother couldn't find the strength to leave him," Bernstein said, adding after a pause, "It was some sort of Greek tragedy."

It is not surprising that John Steinbeck is his favorite author. "I always believed no novel was worth reading unless it had some social consciousness. I was sympathetic to everyone except the Nazis. I think there's some good in everyone, even my father. Once I saw it; when my mother died, he cried. After the funeral I never saw him again. She was 65."

By now a practiced interview subject, Bernstein chooses his words as carefully when he speaks as when he writes. In both mediums, he tells his story honestly and without self-pity. This is a particularly sad time in his life. Physically active until two years ago, he now needs a cane to get around. His wife, Ruby, died five years ago, after 67 years of marriage. "Ruby made all the difference in the world," he recalled. "I entered a new life with her. I no longer had the drunkenness and fights [of his father]. No man was as happy as I was in that time. It never occurred to us that one of us had to go."

After years of retirement, it was his wife's death that spurred him to write his story. "I had to do something to fill the terrible void," he said. And so he reached into his Jewish past to write about his childhood. "The character of my first rabbi – he was one I loved to write about. He took the place of my father in a way – my male role model." In fact, he said, "being Jewish had a great deal to do with my writing. When you're Jewish, you're different from the people across the street. You're aware you're different. Being different made me want to write about it."

When he came to the United States with his family in 1922, he was 12. His brothers and sisters worked, so, he said, "we had, for a while, some good years. My mother was filled with pride. We even had a piano." But then the Depression came. When he met his future wife, he was doing freelance work writing articles for magazines, but had no regular job. Later he reviewed scripts for a film studio and finally took a job editing a trade magazine. He and Ruby had two children, Charles and Adraenne, and then six grandchildren.

The Invisible Wall is not his first book; many years ago he wrote a novel, which was published but universally ignored. Not so this latest work. Since its March publication by Random House in England, The Invisible Wall has been translated – or will be – into German, Swedish, Italian, and Norwegian and has received universally positive reviews – which, he confessed, "has excited me; I didn't think the book was that good."

Bernstein produced the book – all 297 pages – on an IBM Selectric typewriter in his modest house in a retirement community. The Dream, a sequel to The Invisible Wall and also written on the IBM, is 10 pages short of completion but has already been bought by Random House. Of more recent vintage, however, is a laptop computer he is learning to use so he can answer his e-mail.

While we were talking, a fruit basket arrived from his publisher – a birthday present: He is 97 today and a newly published author. A rare smile appeared on his face. "I'll certainly write to thank them," he said. Maybe even send them an e-mail.

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