From the time I could walk I accompanied my father on his visits to the Brooklyn Public Library branch a mile from our home. The old man loved libraries, had worked in one at the University of Warsaw during his bohemian days when, in the months before the Nazis onslaught –he escaped on the last ship out of the free port of Danzig—he wrote poetry and tried to get on at one of the Polish capital’s Yiddish papers. Though he was fluent in half a dozen languages, literary English was not one of them.