But one of the things that my father did was to let me read comics. Now people used to say that’s bad because it isn’t — it spoils your English but, in fact, letting me read — I devoured all kinds of comics — fed my love for English and my love for reading but I suppose if he had been firm I might not have developed this deep love for reading and for English, which stood me in good stead when I later went into hospital for 20 months. I did have something to do. I had — as things maybe got a little bit more serious, I was given a diet — we didn’t have too many books but my father was keen that one read things like Aesop’s Fables and Lamb’s, Tales from Shakespeare . I didn’t read the originals but I read these stories that describe what Shakespeare was saying in the plays and that possibly was something that sharpened your appetite for later.

Very much so. I went to synagogue regularly. My first education was interpreting the Bible. But I also grew up with German folk songs and stories, which became as much a part of my imagination as the Bible stories. My sense of history came from these stories—I was fascinated with what you might call fairy-tale-shaped history. But from the beginning I felt I belonged to a different people, which wasn’t any problem for me. I made the German landscape, which was very beautiful to me—flowing rivers, mountains, forests, lakes—into a biblical landscape. The valley of sunshine into which we went on school excursions in my imagination became the valley in which David and Goliath fought.

It’s amazing. I just started looking at everything differently. I love that book. But a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information.

I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.