His father was David Kalman Garfield, a flamboyant businessman who experienced frequent economic reversals, and his mother was Rose Blaumstein Garfield. Because his parents constantly fought, Garfield concluded that he had "a rather Dickensian background." More recently, in an interview with Roni Natov, he said that his one true resemblance to Dickens comes from the fact that his father, unable to afford the art studies his son had just begun, put him to work in a London office, which he hated.
At about this time, at the age of nineteen, Garfield entered his first marriage, which lasted three months. In 1940, after two or three months of office work, Garfield was called for military service. He served as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, which trained him in biochemistry and hematology, enabling him to qualify for work in hospitals after his discharge. Garfield's military service also included a stint on the War Crimes Investigation Team, a position he was given after he falsely claimed to be an interpreter so that he would not be sent to serve in the Far East. His work included a trip to Belsen, where he spent months digging up corpses to provide evidence for murder trials.
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