The author beat up his father and persuaded his mother to flee with him to New York, where his two older brothers helped them settle in Brooklyn. With the Great Depression, family fortunes nosedived, and Bernstein’s plans for higher education ended when his father stole his and his mother’s savings. Surprisingly, his grandfather, a family embarrassment because he made his living as a street beggar and was the focus of loud, invective-filled family arguments, revealed that a guilty conscience over past injustices to Bernstein’s mother had prompted him to provide the tickets to America. But the ’20s were relatively good times, and the young author got a high-school education. The father, depicted as thoroughly despicable, swiftly alienated the grandmother, and they were all thrown out of the grandparents’ home. Lugubrious memoir from the nonagenarian author of The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007).īernstein was 12 in 1922 when steamship tickets to America from an unknown donor mysteriously arrived, sending the family-hardworking, long-suffering mother, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed father and six children-to join relatives in Chicago.
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