A movie shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week prompted this letter from a former Brooklynite.

To the Editor:

The movie Christopher Columbus, The Enigma, directed by Manoel de Oliveira, the oldest movie producer in the world, was adapted from the book that my wife and I published last year in Portugal and within two weeks after its publication became a best seller in that country.

I am writing you today, because I lived in Brooklyn with my family, at 54 Cheever Place, between 1946 and 1952. It never crossed my mind that someday an international movie about my life was going to be shown at the famous Brooklyn Academy of Music.

When I was a student at New York University, between 1948 and 1952, I passed many times by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but at that time I did not have the money to enter that famous theater. I became a medical doctor, specializing in internal medicine at the famous Lahey Clinic in Boston, practiced my specialization for 40 years at the Bristol County Medical Center, in Bristol, Rhode Island, and for the past ten years I have been enjoying my retirement.

Besides enjoying medicine I have written eight books, in medicine and history. All my family lives here in beautiful Bristol: our two sons, their wives and  four grandchildren.

I am sending you this note so you can verify that an old Brooklynite became a protagonist in a fairy tale story of an international movie!

Manuel Luciano da Silva, M. D.
Bristol, Rhode Island

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