'T.H. Huxley, a 19th century scientist and writer, said Autobiographies are essentially works of fiction...what I intended to write was a second volume of autobiography mixed in with an historiette of the almost defunct Cork-Jewish community. Of course what I needed for the teller was a character old enough to be able to retell sufficient and sufficiently interesting extracts from the more than century old Cork Jews' story. 'Where did Aaron come from, or how? I didn't clone him - if I had, we would have been genetically identical. That, we certainly weren't; he didn't come from me, he just came to me, and he quickly became both a sort of Jewish seanachie-historian, and an old man with a missing life. He found a missing life, a late one, but a deserved one.'