Background
Juan Goytisolo was born to an aristocratic family. He has claimed that this level of privilege, accompanied by the cruelties of his great-grandfather and the miserliness of his grandfather (discovered through the reading of old family letters and documents), was a major reason for his joining the Communist party in his youth. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, while his mother (Julia Gay ) was killed in the first Francoist air raid in 1938.
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