Patrick Radden Keefe

Zach was born in the year 2000 into a kind of comfortable, loving, bourgeois, well-educated, well-connected London family.

There was an interesting wrinkle in his family history, which is that both Rochelle and Matthew were the children of Holocaust survivors.

And in fact, their fathers had both survived the Holocaust, but lost virtually their whole families.

And both of these men died.

had arrived in London as teenagers, essentially solo in the world, having lost their families in Europe.

They both arrived and kind of had to make new lives in London.

So there was that bit of backdrop.

But other than that, Zachary was a kid who I think to any normal way of thinking, you'd say this was a very privileged child.

He was born with a lot of advantages, a lot of opportunities.

But he came of age in a period in which London was transforming into a destination for plutocrats.

And so he grew up feeling as though he actually didn't have quite enough because his family didn't own a huge mansion and they didn't drive a luxury sports car.

Yeah, I mean, I think there was a tradition in this family.

You know, his grandfather was a guy named Hugo Grin, who, after surviving the Holocaust and building a new life in London, became a rabbi and became perhaps the most famous rabbi in London in the second half of the 20th century.

He was kind of a public intellectual.

There was a famous BBC radio show called Moral Maze, and he was a regular on that series.

And Zach's parents did raise him to do the right thing,

They had a sense that was both kind of quite British, I think, and also maybe particular to the children of refugees, which they were, which was that you want to live within your means.

You know, you don't want to live too ostentatiously.

And Zach ended up getting rejected from the quite elite school that his big brother got into.

And at 13, he took that rejection quite seriously.