ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an auto-biographical review of Leon Grunberg's journey into the intellectual and social-political contexts. As an eight-year-old boy he was excited by the sandbags and the anti-aircraft guns at the end of our street in Cairo and the sounds of British bombers flying above our blacked-out house. Although his family had been part of a very small Jewish minority in Egypt, he had never felt like an outsider, perhaps because Cairo in the fifties was a lively, cosmopolitan metropolis, home to a wide variety of religious and national groups. It was in secondary modern school that he got a first-hand look at the oppositional culture of working class boys so vividly portrayed by Paul Willis in Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Leon became fascinated by American society, by the images and stories of crime, riots, racial inequality, and brutal war but also by the physical space in the films which he saw.
