I just finished reading
The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein. It was an excellent read albeit so sad. The writing is beautiful. The author does an amazing job of painting word pictures so you can visualize the scenes and people described, Jewish life in a small English mill town before and after World War I. It's a heart-breaker though in its description of Jewish life, the poverty, the anti-Semitism, and the problems his family suffers.
The "Wall" refers to the separation between Jews and Christians on his street and the book shows the tragic consequences of a lack of a Jewish education. It doesn't have a happy ending but I loved it anyway. And I see that he wrote a sequel and then a third book which I look forward to reading.
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An old friend found me after many years of not having seen or spoken to each other. She was raised Christian, due to the fact that her mother, born to Moroccan Jews, was raised in an orphanage and married a Christian. Her mother, halachichally Jewish, had no Jewish education to pass to her children and raised them as devout Christians. She was married to a missionary Baptist and they raised their children as devout Christians. My friend had a tumultuous life and has one child, a daughter, who has devoted her life to Christianity and is about to become a missionary. They know nothing about Judaism although Christian education consists of memorizing bible passages in what they refer to as the old testament. She can quote you line and verse as to where something is but usually does not know the meaning of it. The one thing that I notice about Christianity is that it is all about what the person is believing at any given moment. Believing is the sole determining factor of what makes a person Christian.
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