Storyteller Roslyn Bresnick-Perry was a warmhearted woman of clear, unabashed political, social, and personal beliefs, and her death on August 7, 2015, has left a rent in weave of our storytelling universe. In her long life, Roz was many things. These are just some of them, but let us remember that facts and truth are often strange-or even nonexistent-bedfellows:* She was firstborn of three children.* She lived and was nurtured in a world that no longer exists.* At age of seven, she was a U.S. immigrant.* She was a bright young woman who was an early school failure because no one had even attempted to understand, no less define, dyslexia.* She went, with many of her landsmen, into needle trades, work that required little to no reading.* As with everything she pursued, she excelled, and rose to senior designer.* She married and gave birth to two boys.* The boys grew up near Van Cortlandt Park, in Northwest Bronx, New York, with so many other shtetl (a small pre-Holocaust town with many Jewish residents) immigrants that it was often referred to as the Diaspora.* Roz immersed her sons in Yiddishkeit (traditional Western and Central European Jewish culture), taking them to Yiddish theater, bringing them to political events, and sending them to Jewish-Socialist Workmen's Circle to learn language of their mother's people.* Her second son Robert is an award-winning puppeteer, and her first son Martin is an internationally acclaimed composer and professor of music at Yale University.* With boys this smart and creative, she came to understand that she was not as limited as her early educators had assumed she was.* In her early fifties, Roz entered college at Fordham University in Bronx, and there is where she found herself, her core intelligence, her brilliant ability to communicate, and her desire to make a life that was uniquely reflective of herself.* She was planning to pursue a PhD at Columbia University when an advisor there suggested that she would be both happier and more effective communicating through her writing and live arts.* Enter storytelling into her life, and a shidduch (love match) was made.* Storytelling proved perfect vehicle for her energy, knowledge, and skills. Oh yes, and did I mention her huge heart? Consider it noted with stars.* The rest, her Lifetime Achievement Award from National Storytelling Network, her books, her poetry, her endless energy to have her stories heard, are now legendary.The Personal Was PoliticalIf you were to ask Roz about her politics, she might look at you as if you'd just stepped in from another planet. She never had to broadcast her belief system. For her, personal was political, and vice versa. She lived her politics. Roz divorced, then remarried her second husband George Perry. She said, Yes, he is worst driver on planet, but he loves me. One major issue in their relationship had to do with where to live. George wanted to move north to Yonkers in Westchester County, but Roz considered Yonkers complacent suburbs and returned south to middle of her passionate city.She did, of course, support Adlai Stevenson for president and attend a Paul Robeson concert at which audience received a literal stoning from those who felt their patriotism was in question. As years rolled by, Roz did not sit back and watch world before her roll by. She had lived hazard of this approach. Even into her eighties, she was still likely to get out on a picket line or join a large mass demonstration. When George W. Bush was gearing up for an invasion of Iraq, she was out on streets with thousands of other New Yorkers. was just terrible, she said. wouldn't let us get anywhere near event. They called where they led us a 'free speech zone.' It was so far away, it was more like a 'be silenced' zone! …