The woman who taught me my first languages (English and German) was not my mother but a refugee from Germany who had been engaged by my parents as my governess when I was only a few months old. Her name was Ellin Slonitz and she had escaped Nazi Germany with her parents, her sister and her brother, shortly after the Old Synagogue of Stuttgart had been set on fire during Kristallnacht. Her father was a Czech engineer who had migrated to Germany during World War I. Ellin was born on 22 November 1914 in Rotenburg an der Fulda, Hessen. She died in Florida on 8 March 1995, four months after her eightieth birthday.

I was born in Buenos Aires, but since my father had been appointed ambassador to Israel, when I was still a baby we moved to Tel-Aviv, to a recently built house on Trumpeldor Straße. Ellin and I were allotted the basement: a large room whose windows were four small rectangles close to the ceiling through which I could see the grass of the square garden outside and a strip of sky. The four palm trees that stood in the middle of the lawn were invisible from my windows, and I always felt surprised at their appearance when Ellin took me out into the garden to play, as if I expected them to vanish while I was sleeping. Their daily rediscovered presence was very reassuring.

Once (I must have been four or five), while I was building a landscape for my lead-metal toys (I had a magnificent collection of both farm and wild animals), I told ...