The Story That Must Not Be Told: A Dead Woman’s Memoir

by DEENA METZGER

Hand to Hand Publishing Book Cover by Deena Metzger Fifty years ago a German student comes to Los Angeles to study, and later commits suicide. Fifty years later, her brother in Germany visits Deena Metzger in Los Angeles, who was her teacher, to ask her what she knows of her. What followed from that alliance is this novella, a fiction that is not a fiction, an unfolding emergence of facts, an investigation of history, events and stories, showing us how wounds going back generations still affect us, with their startling resemblance to the grim political dramas of today.

—Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden, and the Suicide Museum

“A brother who courageously seeks, fifty years afterwards, the truth about his sister’s suicide. A dead woman demanding that the secret crimes of history and armament that led to her destruction be told. And, finally, a Writer devoted to memory and compassion, haunted by how Nazi Germany, dictatorial Chile, the first nuclear bomb and the perennial suffering of the Palestinian people echo in today’s broken America, unafraid to reckon with the past and warn us about the future and deliver a dirge for the dead who refuse to be silenced. The result of this gathering of voices? A heart-breaking, heart-enhancing ghost story of whirlwind proportions, an incantatory, ethical thriller masterfully rendered by one of our great contemporary visionaries.”

Deena Metzger is a radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 50 years and a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleaguered world. She has written eight works of fiction, five poetry collections, several plays and works of non-fiction. Her books examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing. Her novel La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland Pen Award and her Warrior Poster photograph is celebrated around the world as a testament to a woman’s triumph over breast cancer. Deena has also been actively engaged in integrating Indigenous wisdom and medicine practices into contemporary culture through her projects ReVisioning Medicine, the Literature of Restoration, Daré and the 19 Ways Training for the 5th World. Deena lives at the end of the road in Topanga, California.

La Vieja: A Journal of Fire is now available on Amazon or Bookshop.org or order through your favorite independent bookstore.