 Born in the 1880s to a wealthy Jewish merchant family in Germany, Mordecai’s early childhood was tinged with the faint awareness of the pogroms underway in eastern Europe at the time.He grows into an exceptional scholar and studies at Oxford, where a brief affair with the daughter of an English nobleman leaves him heartbroken.Soon before returning home to fight for Germany in World War I, his mother sends a letter to tell him that her father has renounced Judaism; relatives later blame her death on this decision.