He has an older sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922.[1] Frederick Steiner was a senior lawyer in the Austrian Central Bank, and Else Steiner was a Viennese grande dame.[7] Five years before George Steiner's birth, his father had moved his family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of Nazism. He believed that Jews were "endangered guests wherever they went"[6] and equipped his children with languages. Steiner grew up with three mother tongues: German, English, and French; his mother was multilingual and would often "begin a sentence in one language and end it in another."[6] When he was six years old, his father, who believed in a good classical education, taught him to read the Iliad, Homer's epic poem, in the original Greek.[6][8][9] His mother, for whom "self-pity was nauseating",[6] helped Steiner overcome a handicap he had been born with, a withered right arm.