"As far as I can tell from the genealogy records, [my mother's] family came from Holland in the mid-1850s and settled in the central London area in the Jewish district. My [maternal] grandfather was a cigar maker and also worked with…

“I have a family tree that goes back to 1490, so we lived in Germany a—500 years my family, over 500 years. We were steeped in German culture, European culture: music, art, literature, Goethe, Schiller. Both of my grandparents and my father fought…