Elie Wiesel grants few interviews. This conversation took place in 1978, during two sessions at his apartment a few months before his fiftieth birthday. Through the open windows of his book-filled study, breezes carried the sounds of Manhattan spring afternoons. It was a rare privilege to converse with him. His dark, deep-set eyes were like the eyes of one of his characters in which “joy and despair wage a silent, implacable, eternal battle.”
