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Wiesel   Letter 7 reply   23Jun99   I never used this quote!
The Elie Wiesel letter below is in response to my letter to him of 28May99, "Setting a bad example."

What Mr. Wiesel possibly means in his reply below is not that he never used the Edmund Burke quote, but that he never took credit for being its author.  An InfoSeek search for "Elie Wiesel, Edmund Burke" turns up as the first hit a site that appears to be in a Scandinavian language, and which has a photograph of Elie Wiesel, and which is headed by the same quotation, but this time correctly attributed to Edmund Burke:

http://parallel.park.org:8888/Guests/Stavanger/wiesel.htm

Thus, at the moment the most plausible interpretation of the incorrect attribution of the Edmund Burke quote to Elie Wiesel on the La Salle Academy web site may be that Elie Wiesel does indeed sometimes employ the quotation, but that he does not claim its authorship, with the error in attribution being that of the La Salle Academy.  Another interpretation is that some unkown person published an Elie Wiesel web page together with the Edmund Burke quotation, and others seeing this have on their own initiative begun to tie the same quotation to Elie Wiesel, sometimes getting the attribution wrong.
Boston University

ELIE WIESEL
University Professor and
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities

745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts  02215
617/353-4566


June 23, 1999

Mr. Lubomyr Prytulak
[Address]


Dear Mr. Prytulak,

    Thanks for your recent mailing regarding the La Salle Academy web page citation.  They are wrong...I never used this quote!

Sincerely,

[no signature]

Elie Wiesel
Dictated, not signed
EW/ob

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