Elie Wiesel: Embracing memory and madness

He is not frail, but I suspect I am not the first to feel the instinct to protect him, to speak quietly, not to move suddenly, to live up to the sophistication and humanity he deserves.
"Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind'"
His wife, Marion, was his translator for many years, but recently she has been called to full-time work at the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which the couple started after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and which suffered losses of around $15 million, substantially all of its assets, in the Bernard Madoff scandal.
"A Mad Desire to Dance," the author explains, is a response to his 1964 novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," in which Michael, a Holocaust survivor, returns to the town in which he was born, is captured by communists, imprisoned and tortured.

Fonte: http://www.greenwichtime.com/ci_11813482