{"product_id":"a-memory-a-monologue-a-rant-and-a-prayer-isbn-9780345497918","title":"A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer","description":"Selections from the “Until the Violence Stops” Festival\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFeaturing writings by Abiola Abrams • Edward Albee • Tariq Ali • Maya Angelou • Periel Aschenbrand • Patricia Bosworth • Nicole Burdette • Kate Clinton • Kimberle Crenshaw • Michael Cunningham • Edwidge Danticat • Ariel Dorfman • Mollie Doyle • Slavenka Drakulic • Michael Eric Dyson • Dave Eggers • Kathy Engel • Eve Ensler • Jane Fonda • Carol Gilligan • Jyllian Gunther • Suheir Hammad • Christine House • Marie Howe • Carol Michèle Kaplan • Moisés Kaufman • Michael Klein • Nicholas Kristof • James Lecesne • Elizabeth Lesser • Mark Matousek • Deena Metzger • Susan Miller • Winter Miller • Susan Minot • Robin Morgan • Kathy Najimy • Lynn Nottage • Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy • Sharon Olds • Hanan al-Shaykh • Anna Deavere Smith • Diana Son • Monica Szlekovics • Robert Thurman • Betty Gale Tyson • Alice Walker • Jody Williams • Erin Cressida Wilson • Howard Zinn\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis groundbreaking collection, edited by author and playwright Eve Ensler, features pieces from “Until the Violence Stops,” the international tour that brings the issue of violence against women and girls to the forefront of our consciousness. These diverse voices rise up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of brutality, neglect, a punch, or a put-down. Here is Edward Albee on S\u0026amp;M; Maya Angelou on women’s work; Michael Cunningham on self-mutilation; Dave Eggers on a Sudanese \u003cbr\u003eabduction; Carol Gilligan on a daughter witnessing her mother being hit; Susan Miller on raising a son as a single mother; and Sharon Olds on a bra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese writings are inspired, funny, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and beautiful. But above all, together they create a true and profound portrait of this issue’s effect on every one of us. With information on how to organize an “Until the Violence Stops” event in your community,\u003ci\u003e A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer \u003c\/i\u003eis a call to the world to demand an end to violence against women.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the current era, it takes some brain racking to think of anyone else doing anything quite like Ensler. She’s a countercultural consciousness-raiser, an empowering figure, a truth-teller.”\u003cbr\u003e–Chicago Tribune\u003cb\u003eEve Ensler\u003c\/b\u003e is an internationally bestselling author and an acclaimed playwright whose works for the stage include \u003ci\u003eThe Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Good Body\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eInsecure at Last\u003c\/i\u003e, a political memoir. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. In the last decade, V-Day has raised more than $70 million for grassroots groups that work to end violence against women and girls around the world. Eve Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.Looking for the Body Music\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMichael Klein\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy friend Frank calls it looking for the body music—the music my mother heard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the end of looking for the body music, one stumbles upon a woman’s body\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewith the whole world taken out of her—but before that scene,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea foreshadow: my mother at the boarding school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe’s twelve, child of two alcoholics, vaudevillians, shadows on a stage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe’s overweight and sees beyond herself even then, so the girls\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eare mean in their pressed dresses and routinely hang my mother out\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe window by her feet for a long time waiting for the exactly right cadence of please before they pull her back into her life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was in 1940-something—the year my mother began\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe book her mind was writing called this is what happened to me—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe book she read to us—pill-language to cushion the abyss of two marriages—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eone husband beat her up, one husband took her money and broke her off\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewith the world until she got written as the failed suicide after hanging by a thread\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eby a hair, by her feet, borne of her fierce suspension\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eover something called a youth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e7 Variations on Margarita Weinberg\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMoisés Kaufman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDedicated to the memory of Rebeca Clisci Akerman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother was born in the Ukraine but immigrated to Venezuela before the Second World War. She told me this story:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA young Jewish woman was kidnapped by a group of Cossacks during a pogrom. They brought her into a room and held her down, deciding who would have her first.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you touch me I will put a curse on you,” the woman said. “I am a witch.” The Cossacks laughed. “I can prove it!” she shouted. “I can prove to you that I’m a witch.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir leader smiled and said, “Very well. Prove it, then.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I am immortal,” she said, “and you cannot kill me.” They laughed some more. “You cannot kill me. Not even if you shoot me. Try it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey stopped laughing and looked at her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Here. Try it.” She pointed to her chest. “Shoot me right here. You will see that I’m immortal.” The Cossacks looked at one another but didn’t move.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Shoot me in the heart. You will see I won’t die. And then you’ll have your proof that I’m a witch.” The leader thought for a moment, then quickly took out his pistol and shot her in the heart. The young woman fell to the floor bleeding, looked at the man who had shot her, and said, “Thank you, you imbecile.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother liked stories of heroic suicides.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother wanted to be a doctor when she was young. But in the Ukraine in 1935, there were only a few seats at the university allotted to Jews, and all of them went to men. So she became a nurse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen she told her family in 1937 that she wanted to go to Venezuela, everyone was against it. They hardly knew where Venezuela was on the map.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut her fiancé, Boris (my grandfather), had moved here two years earlier to make his fortune, and he wanted her to come join him; business was going well for him and he was worried about rumors of a war in Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don’t know if it was the imminent war or the invitation of a lover in the tropics, or both, but she came here. She was twenty-two years old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story goes that when she arrived in Caracas, she was a woman of such delicate beauty, every immigrant wanted to marry her. (I’ve seen pictures, and she was stunning.) And my grandfather said, “Although I brought you here, you have no obligation to marry me. We’ve been apart for two years, and your feelings might have changed. You can have your pick of any man in our community.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother cried, moved by his words, and told him that yes, it was her decision. And her decision was to marry him. (Another version of the story is that their marriage had been arranged by their parents in the Ukraine, and that his asking her to choose to marry him was a testament to his liberal views, so she married him.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen their first child was born, my grandmother named her Margarita, which is the name of Venezuela’s national flower. Margarita Weinberg. (Her Jewish name, Miriam, came from my grandmother’s mother, who had died when my grandmother was two.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother was the storyteller in the family.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn some arrangement made long before I was born, she had inherited the responsibility of keeping our narratives and our history alive for us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“My brother was a Communist who left our village in the Ukraine and went to Paris to join the Resistance fighters against the Nazis,” she said. “He became one of their best spies. A street in Paris is named after him.” Two years after he joined the Resistance, he was surprised on a mission inside a German arsenal in a suburb of Paris. “When the Nazis surrounded the arsenal, he used all the weapons in it to defend himself. He killed many Nazis that day,” she told us. “He saved the last bullet for himself.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHeroic suicides . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI grew up with these narratives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e4.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt nineteen my mother, Margarita, met a young man named Simon, who’d arrived in Venezuela after the war, from Romania. He’d survived the war by sewing and selling the yellow Stars of David that the Jews were made to wear. He spent most of the war alternately hiding in a small room and selling Stars of David. He was eleven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother’s childhood in Venezuela was idyllic. The country was blessed with warm weather and kind inhabitants who were welcoming to the immigrants. The war was an ocean away, and my mother heard about it only when my grandparents would talk in hushed tones about relatives who had stayed behind and were now either in concentration camps or dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSimon was brought to Venezuela by his aunt, who had a successful clock shop in the center of town. She brought him to my grandmother’s house to meet my mother. They went out on a few dates, and then he asked her to marry him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe liked him, but her intuition told her she shouldn’t marry him—he came from such a different life. She had never known hunger or war, except in the heroic and suicidal stories of her mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut my grandfather Boris said, “Do you think there’s a line of men waiting for you? We are a small Jewish community here. He’s a good man. You should marry him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother heard this but said nothing. And my mother married him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer strongest memory of her wedding day is standing under the canopy in the synagogue thinking, “What am I doing here? This feels like suicide.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e5.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir marriage was a disaster. My mother’s intuition about Simon, my father, was absolutely correct. They were from two different worlds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy father’s Eastern European upbringing, already stern and strict, had then been further hardened by the war. He loved Spi- noza, Schopenhauer, and other severe European philosophers. He was despotic and had little patience for things other than survival. His main interests were making a living, having children, and attending synagogue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother loved American movies and Venezuelan balladeers and porcelain dolls. He was punctual and Germanic in his daily habits. She had the punctuality of people in the tropics and their laid-back attitude. He perceived her as spoiled and lazy. And his inability to understand her quickly turned to fury.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor her part, she often thought herself superior to him. The war had left deep scars: His manners were lacking or nonexistent; he laughed too loudly, spoke broken Spanish, and ate voraciously. (He told me he had been hungry for so long that he thought one could never have enough food to be satiated.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e6.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEvery Friday night there would be a Sabbath dinner at our house. My clearest memory of those dinners was my father’s bright red face and the swollen veins in his neck as he yelled accusations. “The Sabbath candles were not lit at the right time! You don’t care about the Sabbath! What kind of a mother are you? This food is terrible! You don’t know how to cook! The children are too loud, what have you taught them?” Each attack was louder than the last: the shouting, the insults.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd yet every time my mother tried to answer him, my grandfather would say, “Margarita, let it be. Shoin.” (“Enough” in Yiddish.) And he wouldn’t let her respond. If my mother tried again, he would again say “Shoin,” and silence her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps he thought this the best way to diffuse the argument, perhaps he himself was afraid of my father, perhaps he felt pity for him. Whatever the reason, my mother was always the one encouraged to silence. “Let him have his way,” my grandfather would tell her. “Who cares?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the most striking thing to me, even as a young boy, was that my grandmother would watch and listen and never say a word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMargarita was being savagely attacked by my father and silenced by my grandfather and my grandmother said nothing—not a word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e7.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI thought my grandmother was heroic. She had to be, to cross the Atlantic, to settle in a small Latin American village without knowing the language, to raise three children in this new land, and to bear the responsibility of keeping our narratives alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut what good are narratives if they lead to suicide?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow could she stand by and watch her daughter be assaulted and do nothing? Did she think the harassment would end? Did she not realize that my mother needed her mother to defend her?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother thought of suicide many times. But she had three children. That’s the trouble with heroic stories . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy grandmother passed away seven years ago, and since then another tacit agreement has made me the writer in the family, the keeper of our stories. Members of my family come to me to ask about the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so in writing this story I call my mother to make sure I’ve gotten it right. And I take the opportunity to ask her about these events. “Did you ever ask your mother why she didn’t defend you?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I was an adult. I had three children. It was not for her to defend me,” she tells me. “And I think you have part of the story wrong.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe tells me a different version of my grandmother’s arrival in Venezuela, one she heard from her aunt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this version, after my grandfather left the Ukraine to come to Venezuela, my grandmother fell madly in love with a revolutionary Communist. Her father forbade the affair, and the Communist lover, brokenhearted, went to Spain to fight in the civil war. There he was killed in battle. Her father, keenly aware of the imminent war in Europe, forced my grandmother to go to Venezuela and marry my grandfather.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf this version is true, my grandmother’s heroic tales served a deeper purpose than I had originally imagined. They weren’t a code of conduct, or a commitment to revolt; they were simply the longings of an adolescent Ukrainian girl living in the tropics. Heroic actions that she could fantasize about but never act upon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe real lesson she had learned from her father was: Compromise to survive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe heroine in my grandmother’s pogrom story might have survived had she compromised. Her brother would have been captured and maybe even lived a few more years had he not used the bullet on himself. But they decided against it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese stories were the road not taken. The life not lived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd hence she could dream them, but she could not really teach her daughter how to act on them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuicide was good in fiction. Not good in reality. In reality silence and obedience seemed to secure survival.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd heroism was a virtue to admire in a novel or a trans- atlantic journey. But not a recipe for life . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother eventually divorced my father, then married him again and divorced him again. That was ten years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m glad you’re writing this down,” she tells me. “It certainly doesn’t have the flair of your grandmother stories.” She smiles. “It took me a long time and many rewrites, but I finally left your father. And I’m satisfied with that outcome”—she pauses—“and that it didn’t end in suicide.”Author of The Vagina Monologues and Insecure at Last; Writings to stop violence against women and girls; Contributors include Edward Albee, Tariq Ali, Maya","brand":"Villard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302528831717,"sku":"NP9780345497918","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345497918.jpg?v=1767720641","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-memory-a-monologue-a-rant-and-a-prayer-isbn-9780345497918","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}