Open Heart

Translated by Marion Wiesel A profoundly and unexpectedly intimate, deeply affecting summing up of his life so far, from one of the most cherished moral voices of our time. After years of health problems--but none with his heart--Elie Wiesel, then eighty-two, was told that he needed immediate surgery to clear his blocked arteries. On what he knew might very well be his deathbed, Wiesel reflected on his many losses and accomplishments, and on all that remained to be done. Fortunately for all of us, he survived to turn those reflections into this luminous book. He writes of his affection for his family, departed or still on this earth; his aspirations for, and uncertainties about, his writings; and his hope that he has made the world a better place. Open Heart reveals the love, regrets, and abiding faith of an extraordinary man. It is powerfully moving and wholly unforgettable.

Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when he was deported to Auschwitz. After the war he became a journalist and writer in Paris, and since then has written more than fifty books, both fiction and nonfiction. His masterwork, Night, was a major best seller when it was republished recently in a new English translation. Wiesel has been awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor’s Grand Cross, an honorary knighthood of the British Empire and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1976 he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University.