Leslie asked me to speak today about Melanie’s earlier publishing days, and I’m honored to do so.

My name is Joan Pinkvoss and I co-founded Aunt Lute Books in 1982 and worked with Melanie in the early 90’s as her editor and, eventually, as her friend.

Together we worked on My Jewish Face, which came out in 1990 and The Issue is Power, which came out in 1992.

Melanie’s final passing from our lives was too soon…it would always have been too soon…and in her last years she had already moved away from many of our lives, or we from hers.

But fortunately for us, writing and publishing were part of Melanie’s life, so we now have a record we can look back on in order to consider those gifts she has left with us.

In her short story collection, My Jewish Face, she has put us in close considered contact with characters much like herself and characters much like the people she had met in her life. She draws thoughtful, humane portraits and carries us through the political 1980’s as mostly seen by working class Jews (often, not surprisingly, raised in Flatbush). We follow characters who as young women—and sometimes older women—come into their own power, and to their own understanding of what it is not only to be a feminist or a lesbian but to be a Jewish lesbian feminist during a time when coalition work demanded a clear understanding of one’s own place in that work.

This is a major gift. And it remains not only a historic record but continues to speak to our contemporary political work.

Her writing is truthful—at moments even raw (she is very honest about the visceral details of a bulimic period and to being, early on, in a violent lesbian relationship) As in her life, so in her writing she is clear-eyed and constantly brings an intelligent evaluation and location to those who are working for social justice, leading us to move beyond our human foibles. Of her fiction she says: “I found in fiction that I didn’t have to be right, didn’t have to have all of the answers. Contempt dropped out and complexity dropped in.”

What she attempts to do in the essays, which comprise The Issue is Power,is what she’d learned in writing fiction: that is “to try…where appropriate, to return to [that] interrogative mood…”  And so she did.

She writes in the introduction to the book that the three themes of power that circle these essays are: the unbalanced power between women and men; the power which is sometimes gained as the partial result of violence-as-tool by oppressed peoples; and the sometimes abusive power of the state of Israel (that can have the unfortunate result of scapegoating Jews as the cause of all power imbalance). But the essays go on to discuss the practice of activism—response and resistance—and the importance of coalition building by strong women of all marginalized groups, giving advice on how to build those movements. All the while discussing the complexities, contradictions, and difficulties that arise in this construction.

Also, in these essays she discusses the importance of writing at a time when women’s works were getting rediscovered and newly published—though still not a part of the mainstream. How important and surprising it was to her, and the women around her, to read the revealed histories of known women—like Dickinson, for instance—who, it now turned out, loved women. She asserts how important culture —especially literary culture—is to building movements. And discusses who owned —and still own— the means to publishing. A problem that continues to need redress today.

Finally— in the introduction to The Issue is Power— Melanie wrote with prescience: “And the stunning question which encompasses all other questions: Is history of no use?” This question leads her to this assertion: “I write because I need history to be of some use.”

Many of you worked alongside—were friends with—Melanie in the years since these books were published, but for so many of us who knew her mostly through her poems, stories and essays, we are gifted by her writing. By her leaving us with a history that is of use — by her living her life in a way that so benefitted all of us in this room—as well as those who are not in this room–and will continue to benefit those who may or may not ever know her name. But we here today attest to that important life and to its embodiment in that name: Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz. Presente!