Borger

When he was growing up, recalls Julian Borger, it felt as if his family “had painted layer after layer of tasteful off-white over the top of something garish, more visceral and unsettling”. His difficult and dissatisfied psychologist father Robert had never managed to overcome “the refugee’s curse” of being “from two places and none at the same time”. His grandmother Erna, when invited over, “would typically arrive late and… insist on making Viennese food from scratch, unpacking her plastic shopping bags on the already…

When Julian Borger’s father took his own life in London in 1983, his family assumed it was linked to recent events. Robert Borger, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, had been passed over for a promotion at work and, after an ultimatum from his wife, Wyn, about his infidelity, had walked out of the family home. But then Borger Jr telephoned Nancy Bingley, who lived in Caernarfon in Wales and had fostered Robert after he arrived from Austria in the late 1930s as a Jewish refugee. On hearing that he had killed…