In Elie Wiesel's latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust - Those conversations are now an opera

Back in 2012, while on assignment as the Chicago Tribune’s longtime music critic, I received a phone call from my editor that would change my life.

Elie Wiesel had just accepted the newspaper’s annual Literary Prize. Would I be interested in interviewing him for the paper?

Would I?!

There was only one minor problem: I had never read a word Wiesel had written, not even his revered Holocaust memoir “Night.” Holocaust education was not required in the 1950s and ’60s when I was growing up — not even in Skokie, a nexus of Holocaust survivors where I lived with my family. As the son of two survivors...