The Story That Must Not Be Told: A Dead Women's Memoir

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.

"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."—Ariel Dorfman author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum