Content area
Full text
Over 50 years, Mel Yoken has amassed 250,000 letters from luminaries
No one gets mail like MeI Yoken.
Over the past half century, Yoken has amassed thousands of letters from luminaries ranging from Moshe Dayan to Marcel Marceau and Elie Wiesel to Ronald Reagan.
Yoken, 72, started corresponding with the famous when he was a graduate student at Brown University in the 1960s. Whenever someone said or wrote something that left him puzzled, he'd dash off a letter.
While some people responded with brief, formal letters, others sent long handwritten notes, and, in time, called Yoken a friend. Today, he has a collection of 250,000 letters, most of them stored at the John Hay library at Brown University.
"You find that way down deep, people are people," said Yoken, who is Chancellor Professor Emeritus of French Language and Literature at UMassDartmouth.
Many of Yoken's correspondents are, like him, Jewish. His initial letters tend to be formal, but they become more personal as the relationship deepens.
Yoken, for example, first started writing to Elie Wiesel in 1969 in response to one of his books. By 1977, the two were sharing news about their families. When Yoken's first son, was born Wiesel wrote the child a letter in the voice of his then 5-year-old son, Elisha.
"My father knows yours," writes Wiesel, in French. "They are good friends. I know it. We will be too, right? ... "We will play together and I will tell you stories."
Yoken's project for the...