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The opening speech of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is one of the most powerful ever penned.

Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, speaking at a woman’s funeral, touches on issues of nationality and affection and identity and…well, it’s pretty amazing in scope (to me, at least). The thought that this speech was at one time just stuck in Kushner’s head, or saved to a flimsy floppy disk, or scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper–the thought that it could have been lost makes me weak in the knees. I’ve copied out a selection I find particularly moving. Don’t let me know if you hate it.

This woman. I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes nor do justice to her dimensions. She was…. Well, in the Bronx Home of Aged Hebrews are many like this, the old, and to many I speak but not to be frank with this one. She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was…not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania–and how we struggled, how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children with your goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes–because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.