Today, Friday November 21 I wrote in my daily column for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant about the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. This article in the New York Times by Bruce Weber and Julie Rehmeyer is an important addition:

“His background and early life were tangled and harrowing. His father, whose name is usually reported as Alexander Schapiro, was a Jewish anarchist who fought against the Russian czarist government. He was captured by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and eventually escaped to Western Europe. Along the way he lost an arm.”

(Read the article here.)

Don Juan misses something, an arm, a child, a foot. This is not to say that everybody who misses a body part, or something else, is a Don Juan, but a true Don Juan always misses something, preferably a body part.