Dan Shechtman was born in 1941 in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine ; the city became part of the new state of Israel in 1948. He grew up in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan in a Jewish family. His grandparents had immigrated to Palestine during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) and founded a printing house. As a child Shechtman was fascinated by Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874), which he read many times. His childhood dream was to become an engineer like the main protagonist, Cyrus Smith.