Dear friends:
So sorry I have been remiss in staying in touch. I hope you have been enjoying the holiday season, whether you have been celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah. Even though the latter is not considered to rank among the most important Jewish festivals, I have always found it attractive because it celebrates the victory of light over darkness, hope over despair, and freedom over tyranny. We do not have the generalized exchange of gifts that often characterizes the Christmas season, but we do eat very well. One of the staples is potato pancakes served with applesauce. These pancakes are fried in oil. Of course, they reek calories and cholesterol, but who cares? One should be allowed to gorge oneself on delicious food at least several times a year.
On the professional level, I am very happy to share some good news with you. I was invited to contribute an article for a special issue commemorating the 10th anniversary of the death of the great Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel. It will be published in an outstanding literary and philosophical magazine that has been in existence for over thirty years in France, La Règle du jeu. The magazine is edited by the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of the very few household names of its kind in France, and the issue will be printed by the publishing house, Grasset, surely one of the most important in the country, if not in the world. Fifteen other authors, many of them international "star performers", have been invited to participate in this special issue. I feel quite honored to be in their presence. So you see, even at the ripe old age of 87, I am still holding my own intellectually.
I have always admired Elie Wiesel's texts. They celebrate the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of degradation and death. In a novel written about ten years before his death, Un désir fou de danser (A Mad Desire to Dance), his over-sixty-year-old hero finally has the intrepidity to risk everything for a fragile chance of happiness by marrying a young woman in her early thirties. The novel reaffirms the author's unconditional embrace of life despite its tragic potential, its innumerable flaws, and its fragility. It is as though, towards the end of his life, Elie Wiesel discovered that God was synonymous with Life itself. What an exalting message! If you don't have the time to read the whole novel, perhaps you would enjoy my analysis of it in my recent book devoted to the novels of this great writer, Words of Witness, The Fiction of Élie Wiesel. It is published by Mosaic Press in Canada and can be ordered through the Mosaic Press website.
I wish you all the sweetest possible New Year, and above all, health--moral, spiritual, emotional, intellectual as well as physical--of the stainless steel variety.
Hugs,
Léonard
