Dear Micha,

Thank you very much for the e-mail attachment of your novel
Abe Zandsta's Discovery, which I have started to read with
somewhat tremulous anticipation. It's much too soon for me
to ask you questions about it. They will come later. The Widener
Library setting is very familiar and congenial to me, not
only because that's where I spent much of the six perhaps
most formative years of my life, but also because Widener
is the site of disappointed hope and frustrated ambition to
which my imagination forced me to return in the guise of the
characters of my novel Die Andere.  From 1946-49, I knew Widener
as an undergraduate in 19th Century History and Literature, in
1950, as a graduate student in Comparative Literature, in 1951,
as a research assistant for Karl Vietor, a Harvard Professor
of German, and 1952 as a participant in Classical Philology
seminars of Werner Jaeger. In those last two years, 1951 and
1952, I was moonlighting in Widener while enrolled in medical
school.  It's not by accident, therefore that my own novel
begins and ends in the stacks. My mention of this circumstance is
an index of my fascination with the novel that you have written,
it's by no means a surreptitious advertisement for the unmarketable
produce of my own imagination. If you were to read my novel,
I should feel embarrassed for having induced you to waste your time.
So don't. A further source of life-long embarrassment has been my
unpronounceable name; Jochen is the word with which I've been berated
and scolded by my family from childhood to just a few minutes ago. 
It was the Harvard Registrar who discovered that I might also be called
Ernst, and made that name the emblem of the sequence of failures that
constitute my professional life. Closest to anonymity, and therefore
most desirable is EJM.