I have always - perhaps since my school years - had one question: why does Socrates, just before his death, give Crito the poignant instruction to sacrifice a rooster to the newly recognized god Asclepius? "Crito," he says, "we owe Asclepius a rooster; fulfill this debt and do not neglect it."

Many years later, while reflecting on my own insignificant life, I realized that, yes, I too owe a lot to many; and primarily, to the neighborhood where I spent my childhood and youth and its people - poor refugees from Minor Asia, indeed remarkable and profoundly cultured.

And to my friends and our circles, with whom I chased the elusive dream of poetry. And to the bleeding Left of the time, which showed me the paths of utopia and their consequences.

The title of the book is a tribute to Stefan Zweig and his great book of the same name, in exile and in his voluntary death. Ch. R.