People had been living there a long time and everybody knew everything there was to know about everybody else. It was, after all, just a small, cobbled street with only two long rows of houses facing one another, all the houses linked together under a common slate roof, with short, stubby chimneys sticking up at the top of each roof in a straight line. The street looked like any other street in the poor section of a Lancashire mill town, with the rows of brick houses all the same, but there was a difference about ours because it had two distinct sides, one occupied by Christians, the other Jews. An invisible wall the imaginary barrier that separated the two sides and kept us apart. And yet, despite that, the cultural differences, ancient enmities, the two sides got along quite well, and when news got out that we had received tickets to go to America there were almost as many Christians as Jews who came over to shake our hands and clap us on the back, to congratulate us and tell us how lucky we were.
