In the spring of 1981 it all came together. After years and years of cajoling and beseeching my editor Nan Talese, she was finally able to convince her higher ups at Houghton Mifflin to publish my first book.

I had met Nan many years before through my then father in law Robert Anderson and over the years, she had become a strong supporter of my work. Finally, after years of effort she convinced her publisher that an unknown and untested photographer was worth the publishing risk. It was agreed that  In the Land of Light, a collection of photographs I had made some years earlier while living in the Middle East on a fellowship, would be published, accepting most of my specifications. What a glorious day it was to hear that finally I was to be published.

Nan suggested I write a small amount of text to accompany some of the photographs as she always liked my stories, and she was primarily a literary editor, having published some of America’s most distinguished novelists. She also thought it imperative that we have someone of note to write the introduction to accompany these highly emotional photographs.

Through Nan, it was arranged that one afternoon I would meet for a few hours with Elie Wiesel the Nobel Piece Prize winner and author of many books about The Holocaust. He is a Holocaust survivor and has been a voice of sadness as well as a voice for the affirmation of life after that tragic event. At the time he was a Chubb Fellow at Yale University. It was there, in a building devoted, appropriately enough to the humanities that I first met Mr. Wiesel. I walked into a sacred space, not because of the space, but because of the humble man sitting in the corner. There in that room this simple man sucked all the noise and energy from the outside into a quiet serene vacuum. No one dared speak loudly or inappropriately in his presence.  You felt his enormous power and charisma not by what he said but by what he quietly demanded, respect.

I walked over to this humble man sitting in the corner introduced myself and handed him a loaf of bread that had been baked by my wife. He smiled held it delicately and reverently. I began to tell him of my request. I wished him to write the introduction and I handed him a box of prints along with some paper containing the text I had written. It was at this point that I realized that I was not alone in the room. There were a number of people there but no one spoke. It was as if you were in the presence of a truly spiritual person. Very little had to be said.

He spoke to me in a whisper and I found myself mesmerized by his words. He accepted the box of prints and the text along with the loaf of bread. He told me to come back next week and he would give me his answer.

One week later to the day I returned to the same room to see this gracious man, and there in the same corner of the same room I saw Mr. Wiesel again.

We spoke for a short while and I remember thinking he was interested in me but unfortunately was not going to write the introduction because of previous commitments, when suddenly he looked past me and asked if the woman behind me was my wife. I said yes and he asked to speak to her. He turned to her and said  “how can I refuse someone who has given me such a wonderful gift such as a loaf of bread,”  and with that brief statement he said I must accept the invitation to write the introduction to your husbands book.

So maybe it was not me nor my pictures, nor my words, although I think they helped judging from the introduction he wrote, but rather the simple gift of a home baked loaf of bread. This simple gift obviously spoke eloquently to this simple man.

With this I was elated. Everything was coming together. The publisher allowed me to choose the printer, which was Acme in Medford Massachusetts. They were the first printer in America to do laser scanned images which produced a much sharper reproduction than traditional camera ready offset printing. They ran numerous tests for me on many of my images and I chose a paper that best suited the imagery. The tests produced the perfect image. The tonality was rich, the imagery sharp, the shadow detail vibrant. Everything was falling into place.

But this is where my story really begins. It reminds me of Isak Dinesen’s story Out of Africa, where the Baroness Karen von Blixen turns to one of her workers on her coffee plantation as the first harvest is caught up in flames, and she states “that just as the gods give you what you have been praying for, they take it all away.” So as life was merrily going along. All my efforts to bring this book to fruition seemed at this point to have finally happened but life has a way of putting a wrench in the wheels of your car. Before you can realize your dreams you must pay the price. See you next week.