How Did Michael Moritz Get His Drive and Grit?

Michael Moritz inherited drive and grit from the daily behavior of his parents, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Wales, rather than from stories they told. Jewish refugees in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s were a further minority. People look at him today and think of an old white man who is not a minority. He understands the look, but how an individual feels matters more than how other people might look at him.

His parents got out of Germany in the 1930s and were never in the camps. They were loath to use the word survivor, because they felt the word denoted somebody who had actually survived the camps. They were refugees and, in their own way, had survived. The odds he faced growing up were unlike his parents' odds, yet the need to survive meant living by his wits, staying very suspicious of the motives of others, and guarding against where bad things will occur. He did not understand the pattern at the time. The atmospheric backdrop gave him drive and grit he would not have had otherwise.

The transfer was definitely not the stories, because his parents did not tell the stories. He did not really get to know the stories until he sat down and began work on the book. He knew only broad sweeps of a miserable, ferocious, catastrophic whirlwind in which they and millions of others were caught up. What reached him was daily behavior, the reaction to events, and the sense that doom was not very far away.