Any man is able to stand aloof from an unjust society. But it helps if he feels different to begin with.

Admittedly, there wasn't much out of the ordinary about my childhood apart from my being Jewish.

Set into the wall that divided the big and the middle–sized rooms and heating both there was a white–tiled stove. It was nice to lean your back against it or to warm your hands on it. The opening of the stove was in the middle–sized room (I don't know why it wasn't just called “the small room”: there were only two rooms in our flat). I liked to watch the fire behind the heavy wrought–iron grating. Every now and then Father or Mother would poke it up, add a piece of wood or coal, and rake the embers to the front. I was not allowed to do this. When I was five or six, I started my first serious revolt. I don't recall what it was all about, but my parents evidently decided to teach me a lesson.

“We don't need a son like you,” they said, put an old tattered coat on me, thrust a stale piece of bread into my hand and told me to be off and seek my fortune. I can still see my father turning aside and smiling. This came to pass on a cold winter's night. There was black frost outside. What really shook me was that the coat they had given me was not the new, smart one that had recently been bought for me, but a nasty threadbare good–fornothing one. I fought back my tears for quite a while, but when the front door was flung open, I could do so no longer and burst into a violent fit of sobbing. I was allowed to stay.

At the age of seven I wrote my first poem, describing the strife of the elements on the Northern Sea. It was a typical piece of juvenilia, but I'm still glad my very first lines were not about the Young Pioneers or something of the sort but about the ocean itself—and in turmoil!

Sometimes I had to help my father carry logs from the cellar up the stairs to our flat.