In the spring of 1997, my dear friend Vicki Gabriner called to ask if I knew Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. I had read some of her stuff and know a little about her work with JFREJ, and maybe we even met at some point, but we didn’t really know one another. Vicki said, “Melanie is terrific and single. You’re terrific and single. Can I give her your phone number because I think you’d be perfect together.” I said sure…and the rest, as they say, is history. She had it 100% right, and for that I say thank you, Vicki!

There are other people to thank today. First, Hector Figuera, Lenore Freidlander, Paola Alvarez and Nelson Rosero and all of the folks from 32BJ whose assistance was invaluable. Second, to the team that helped put this memorial together and the people who offered these moving tributes to Melanie. All of their names are in the program so I won’t say them now.

There are two other groups of people I need to thank. The first is Melanie’s team of health professionals and care givers. I start with Alessandro Di Rocco, Melanie’s neurologist and all-around mensch. To the other doctors, social workers, researchers and administrative folks that worked with him…big, big thanks.  And the people – the women – who cared for Melanie at home: Jasminda Paz-Evans, the incredible gem of a visiting nurse; and our aides, Sidonie Ewane , and the anchor of Melanie’s home care, Christine Ekalle, another major thank you. I have tremendous respect for all of these people but want to call special attention to our aides. We place our loved ones in the hands of people we never met before, people willing and able to give care to a stranger. And both Christine and Sidonie have very strong and yet completely gentle and loving hands. I cannot find the words to say how thankful I am that they gave so much care and comfort to Melanie.

The second group is team Leslie…the people who helped Melanie by helping me in so many ways. My family!  Karen, Steve and Beth, Shauna and David, Joanna and Graeme, Ray and Stefania and all of their children…even when far away, always in my corner, always full of love. My book group – which is as much about our friendships as it is about the books. Barbara Buloff, my therapist…do I need to say more? Marla Erlien who for the last several years has been there for me in every way imaginable, never hesitating and always coming through. Karen Zelermyer, Tami Gold and Harriet Cohen…each of which gave me the support I needed, when I needed it the most. Thank you!

Much has already been said about Melanie, her work, the impact she had, who she was. And yet there is more to say…more than I really have time for today. I urge you to read the postings on the website…the remembrances, and the obits, especially the piece from Literary Lambda, and the one from Mondoweiss.

This is hard, but I do want to say a few things, so please bear with me.

Melanie and I shared our lives for 21 years…and how I wish that could have been so much longer.

The first months of our relationship were filled with telling our stories, soaking up everything we could about one another. Not carrying if we repeated the stories…we were already at an age when we sometimes forgot what we had previously said, or didn’t always remember what we had heard. But it didn’t matter…we were falling deeply in love and just the sound of one another’s voice gave us each great joy.

We talked and talked and talked…and then we danced.

She asked me what my favorite fruit was and I said peach. Hers was nectarine. We both said close enough. We talked about politics and movies and families and our fears and dreams. Nothing was off limits, everything had meaning.

We sat and listened to music…and then we danced.

We imagined a long life together.

Then one day we sat in the doctor’s office and heard the diagnosis: Parkinson’s Disease. We went to our new apartment, sat on the bed, held each other close and cried. Truth is, we had no idea what we were crying about, we didn’t have a clue about how this disease would play out or what it would mean for our lives.

But for many years after the diagnosis our lives went on as they had. Our love grew, our connection deepened and our commitment became stronger. And through all those years, we talked and talked and talked, and then we would dance. As she increasingly lost her ability to speak we continued to find the ways to talk, even if only for brief moments…but the dancing stopped.

Melanie and I were best friends, lovers and playmates.  Last week I woke up one morning and realized that she wouldn’t be here to help me figure out what to wear today. She had a much more finely tuned fashion sense than I do…okay, just about everyone is better at that than I am.  It may sound small but I cannot tell you how much I appreciated that she never insisted, never even suggested, that I wear anything that wasn’t me. She knew me, she got me, and she fully loved me as I am.

Melanie was as interested in my ideas as I was in hers. She pushed me intellectually and politically, but always with great care and compassion. She was my best editor.

Right from the beginning, I knew Melanie was one of the smartest people I had ever met. But she never bragged about her intellectual capacity, her analytic skills, her ability to find the core truth in things big and small. She always wanted to know more, to read what other people were writing, to push herself to see and try to understand the world through the eyes of others. Empathy and solidarity were not just words to her, they were a way of life.

I also knew that her work had an impact on countless people. But it wasn’t until after she died that I really took in the breadth of that impact: people who read her books and had their minds blown, those who heard her read her poetry and found new depth in their own feelings, the people whose masters or doctoral committees she sat on, the many people she organized with, and the countless people she helped in different ways just because that was who she was.

Much of Melanie’s work was grounded in her own, very personal, understanding of violence. She knew its destructive power whether it was a child beaten by a parent; young people shot down in school; a woman abused by a lover; people of color brutalized by racism and murdered by the police; queer people ridiculed, beaten, attacked; whole nations terrorized by US military action; or decades of Palestinians killed and tortured and degraded by the horrors of Israeli apartheid and occupation. For Melanie there was no hierarchy of oppression or pecking order of those on the receiving end of violence used to enforce power and control.

She was also deeply grounded in the belief that everyone had the most basic right to control their own body and to defend themselves, their communities, their people against violence.  She understood the realities of power and the need to be honest in ones assessment of the appropriate tools to use to challenge oppressive power. She was never into suicide missions or martyrdom. She would knock on doors in electoral campaigns or risk arrest in acts of civil disobedience…whatever might work to challenge authority, and shift power relations. It was always about finding the larger community’s power and asserting life.

Soon after Melanie and I first got together I told my mother, Jessie, that we were “seeing” each other. My mother asked if I was happy, which I was, and then in her own very special way said, “Isn’t she very Jewish?” Yes indeed, Melanie was very Jewish. While never religious she always looked for ways to put what she understood as core Jewish values into practice.

Melanie proudly claimed her Jewish identity, just had she had earlier taken on the identities of feminist and lesbian. Her first organizing experiences where in the civil rights movement and then the anti-war movement of the 1960’s. As her politics grew she didn’t leave behind her anti-racism or anti-capitalism foundations. She flourished in the challenge to live a life that brought the pieces together, that pushed the envelope, that raised questions about all the structures of power. Her mind was always at work, and she energetically gave her creative, intellectual and organizing skills to the greater good…to the movement, to community.

Everything about Melanie’s life – her very being  – was grounded in the deepest empathy and the strongest commitment to solidarity I have ever seen. In 1978, in her first book, We Speak in Code, she wrote:

“We all have stories, they should be told. One part of my work is to create space for women to read and hear each other’s work. This is not a matter of generosity, or even of sharing privilege. I think the wildest creativity happens when many are engaged. By connecting with women whose experiences have not been voiced or voiced rarely, we expand who we are, not only enlarging our private understandings of women’s experience, but enlarging the community of women makers so that our experience is more fully, more accurately, named, explored, and known.

And changed. I define my work as “helping to create a climate of female outrageousness.” So if I am a lesbian feminist artist, I am at least equally an activist, happiest when I can be both at once.”

Her empathy played out in the most daily realities of her life. Several months after our first home aide started working with us, something came up that I wanted to be at on a day that the aide was not working…a Saturday. I started to ask Sanya, our aide, if she could work for a few hours that day when Melanie pulled me aside and emphatically said don’t do that – don’t ask her to work. I asked why not, and Melanie said she has a kid and might need to spend time with him, or maybe she needs to go shopping…it’s her weekend and we should not ask her to work. And as I stand here in a union hall, I must say, she was absolutely right.

In May of 2001, at the Jewish Unity for a Just Peace, or JUNITY, conference in Chicago, Melanie proposed what she believed could be a powerful direct action: renouncing the Jewish “right” to Israeli citizenship granted by Israel’s Law of Return. People, she later recalled, were unnerved by the proposal, and responded strongly…but that was fine for after all she was always raising the big questions and posing the hard challenges.

She elaborated on the idea in an essay in “Wrestling with Zion,” edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon: She recalled thinking back to the hundreds of Vietnam vets who had hurled their combat medals onto the steps of the Capitol, trying to imagine a gesture that would “communicate our rage at the Israeli government’s violation of human rights, our grief at the protracted suffering, and our sense of betrayal by those cynics who invoke Jewish survival—our survival—to justify brutality.” Her essay ends with her imagining what she’d say if she were to show up at the Israeli consulate to reject her “right” to aliyah. She said,  “I do not believe the solution to anti-Semitism is the creation of another hated minority so that I can enjoy the privileges of majority. Far from feeling protected by Israel, I feel exposed to danger by the actions of the Israeli state. I identify with those people who cherish life and believe that each of us is worth exactly the same. I am declaring another way to be Jewish.”

In The Colors of Jews – a many-layered book – Melanie took a bold, powerful step and offered an alternative to Zionism. She wrote:

“Diasporism offers a place we might join with others who value a history of dispersion; others who stand in opposition to nationalism and the nation state; who choose instead to value border crossing.

“I name this ideology and practice Diasporism as a deliberate counter to Zionism.

“This is no casual invitation to perpetually wander. The Diasporism I have in mind recognizes the persecution and danger that have made many long for home and passport, yearn to leave the wandering behind. Inside this longing, Diasporism represents tension, resistance to both assimilation and nostalgia, to both corporate globalization that destroys peoples and cultures, and to nationalism, which promises to preserve people and cultures but so often distorts them through the prisms of masculinism, racism, and militarism.

“The political version of love is solidarity. Diasporists value solidarity not as a necessary evil; not solely because, as we confront the most powerful machines of war and capital the world has ever known, we understand that solidarity is our only power. Diasporists choose solidarity as the highest expression of humanity. It’s about, for example, Rachel Corrie placing her body, her life against the Caterpillar bulldozing one more Palestinian home.

“Diasporism cherishes love across the borders—and let’s face it, every reaching out beyond one’s own body is a border crossing.”

As I said in the message I sent out when she died, for many years Melanie fought as hard as she could against Parkinson’s Disease, but this was one battle she could not win. It was a long and often very difficult journey and the last few years were particularly hard as the disease claimed her mind. That brilliant mind that could always make sense of the most complex and challenging realities and her amazing ability to use language in ways few could all slipped away. And still she fought to control her own body, to determine her own destiny.

While I miss her terribly, I am filled with joy knowing how many people she touched. As a friend, co-worker, teacher, writer – an incredible writer – as a sister and comrade and co-conspirator in the struggle for justice and peace, Melanie’s presence was often soft but always strong. Her moral compass was always set in the right direction, and she always had the courage to speak out, to take action, and to bring others along with her.

They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and a second time, when somebody says your name for the last time. I believe Melanie’s name will be said over the years as new generations of activists, and thinkers, and compassionate people step up to play a role in changing this world.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

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