Posted on 05/20/2005 2:19:52 PM PDT by Borges
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio - Former ambassador Milton A. Wolf, who helped host the Carter-Brezhnev SALT II summit in Vienna, died Thursday of complications from lymphoma at his suburban Cleveland home. He was 80.
Wolf, prominent in Democratic fundraising circles and Jewish philanthropy, served as U.S. ambassador to Austria from 1977 to 1980. He hosted the 1979 arms limitation talks in Vienna where President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty.
"A dedicated public servant, he was deeply committed to peace in the Middle East. I will always be grateful for his superb service as ambassador to Austria, where he more than justified the faith I placed in him when I named him to that important post," Carter said in a statement.
A longtime fundraiser in Democratic politics, Wolf worked on Carter's 1976 campaign and served on the Carter inauguration committee. He accepted the envoy's job, in part, because of Vienna's role as a transit point for Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union.
He served from 1992 to 1995 as president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which provides overseas relief aid. Trained as an economist, Wolf was chairman of the Milton A. Wolf Investors private investment firm and previously was president of Zehman-Wolf Construction Co., both of Cleveland.
His wife, Rosalyn Zehman Wolf, died in 2001. He is survived by a son, Leslie Eric Wolf of Beachwood, daughters Nancy Wolf of Pepper Pike, Sherri Wolf of New York City and Caryn Wolf Wechsler of Bethesda, Md., and five grandchildren.
The funeral is scheduled for Sunday at the Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights.
Like they say, "The good die young".
His spirit lives on at the State Department.
Well as one of the Soviet Jews who had to stop in Vienna en route while emigrating to the U.S. I'm sure Mr. Wolf had a hand in making my emigration possible among many other Russian refugees. So I have to have a modicum of gratitude.
Borges is one of my favorite writers, BTW. "Tloen, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius", "Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel" any many others are among the great works of short fiction.
All those are from Ficciones which is endleslly rewarding. He is one of the greats
I've been trying like hell to get a copy (on VHS or DVD) of Buckley's one-hour interview of Borges done for Firing Line in the 1970s. I know that it was available on VHS for a short time, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.
If you ever do find a copy of that interview, please let me know. I've got a CD of Borges being interviewed in Spanish that I got on e-bay. It's worth having. The 4-CD "This Craft of Verse" is good as well, a little repetitious, but hey, it's Borges.
Yes, and I was gratified to see his collected fiction and non-fiction published in hardbound volumes a few years back. Some of his interesting works are missing from it, though, such as many poems from Dreamtigers and "Evaristo Carriego", an underappreciated book.
I have the Goncharov that you're named after sitting on the shelf too. It's worthwhile I take it?
His nonfiction is interesting, too. He gave the best one-sentence comment about Citizen Kane: "A labyrinth with no center." Of course, Borges had a thing for labyrinths.
Many think it's better then his fiction! It's really a crime he never won the Nobel Prize. Oh yeah and about Milton Wolf...hmmm.
I'd love to find that as well.
I don't care about the Nobel Prize--take a look at the list of winners someday and you will be saying "Who?" so much your family will think there's an owl in the house. Besides, he was too blind to see the damned thing, so who cares? His imagination influenced so many, directly and indirectly, that he will live on a lot longer than most Nobel winners.
It's one of my favorite books; quite different from Borges in style but nonetheless the character Oblomov is one of the most memorable in all of literature. It's a shame that this book is not as well known in the West as the works of Dostoievsky or Tolstoy.
What about Fredrich Mistral and Pearl S. Buck! /sarcasm
Dosctoevsky is more highly regarded in the West than he is among Russian speakers. Nabokov said this again and again.
I recognize just a handful of the names, and have read only Naipaul, Heaney, and Brodsky (only Naipaul was worth it). I tried to read Paz, but found it lacking in comparison with other Lat.am. writers such as Borges, Cortazar, and GG Marquez.
The Nobel Prize in Literature since 1985
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2003 J.M. Coetzee
2002 Imre Kertész
2001 V.S. Naipaul
2000 Gao Xingjian
1999 Günter Grass
1998 José Saramago
1997 Dario Fo
1996 Wislawa Szymborska
1995 Seamus Heaney
1994 Kenzaburo Oe
1993 Toni Morrison
1992 Derek Walcott
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1990 Octavio Paz
1989 Camilo José Cela
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1986 Wole Soyinka
1985 Claude Simon
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