This fresh translation by Carl Skoggard of philosopher Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) engaging memoir remains faithful to the author's voice. Readers are offered glimpses of an anonymous Berlin childhood which might have been Benjamin's own, with recollections of an affluent Jewish home in Berlin's West End, circa 1900. Focusing less on events and characters than on places and things, Benjamin vividly reimagines a young child's idiosyncratic private...