'Russia - isn't that somewhere east of Boston?' asked the American airport official. In a sense, she was quite right: if you think about it, the whole world lies east of Boston. That's why I love Americans. They take me back to the beautiful lost world of my sons' childhood, when every question made one feel a solid, knowledgeable grown-up person, though weighed down with the sad and shameful experience of cynicism, deceit, habitual untruth, insoluble moral problems, with the burden of Europe's bloody history, and also with the awareness of one's own mortality - experience from which one would like to protect one's children.

LRB 1 June 1989 | PDF Download