Opening paragraphs...............

In 1933 the first volume of Thomas Mann's Joseph and his
Brothers was published - a tale, according to the author, of
"love and hate, blessing and curse, fraternal strife and
paternal grief, pride and penance, fall and rise."  An early
admirer of the work was a young German banker named
Siegmund Warburg, who read it while sailing from Hamburg
to London - a journey into exile not dissimilar from the one
Mann himself made later the same year.  Warburg, it has
been suggested, was struck by the parallel between his own
family and Joseph's, with whom he himself closely identified.
Of course, the parallel was not exact.  Unlike Joseph,
Siegmund Warburg had no brothers; nor was he being driven
into exile by members of his own family - rather, by a regime
bent on the expulsion and ultimately the destruction of all
the descendants of Jacob.  Nevertheless, even a cursory
glance at the genealogy of the Warburg family indicates
why the parallel might have occurred to him.

High Financier: The Life and Times of Siegmund Warburg
by Niall Ferguson