On April 1, 1933, the day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, my father, Wolfgang Yourgrau, then 24 years old, was attacked by a group of storm troopers in a Berlin shop. He fought back furiously (he was a university boxer) but was badly beaten.
The story of his bloody Nazi brawl and high-adventure escape was part of the familial lore as I was growing up in 1960s Denver, where my father taught at the university.
For her part, my mother, Thella, a Jew from South Africa who had migrated to Palestine in the 1930s, was fond of retelling how in 1946 she was working as a secretary at the British Army offices in Jerusalem's King David Hotel when the building and its occupants were dynamited by Zionist terrorists.
During his time in Palestine, my father published a controversial German-language political and cultural weekly called Orient, which, though quixotic and short-lived, is recognized as part of the German exile literature.
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