If you’re interested in some background history for this monologue, read on!

So in the early 1940s, “Victory Gardens” sprang up around the US in an effort for Americans at home to lend their support to armed forces and allies fighting overseas in WWII. These gardens of vegetables and fruits, grown anywhere from city rooftops and vacant lots to baseball fields and school yards, contributed an estimated 9-10 million tons of produce to Americans on the homeland, making up around 40% of all fruits and vegetables eaten in the US by 1942. By consuming produce grown within their own communities, not only were Americans able to supplement their rations and eat better, but more commercially grown and canned produce was now freed up to be shipped to the troops overseas.

Also, during the late 1930s, in the lead-up to the Holocaust, around 10,000 children in Germany were sent (without their parents) to England, in a life-saving operation called the Kindertransport (“kinder” meaning “children” in German). Can you imagine being a parent, grasping the terrible future that lay ahead and deciding to send your child, alone, to another country, in an effort to keep them safe? Or being a child, traveling, sans parents, on an “adventure” to a new country, maybe understanding, maybe not understanding, what this boat trip actually meant? I’ve seen documentaries and read accounts on this for years, and it has haunted and inspired and gutted me long before I had children of my own. While the US, did not officially participate in the kindertransport, Jewish parents in Europe did still send over their children to the United States in the hopes of saving their lives. Jewish organizations that received the children did their best to place them with families who cared for them.

In my monologue, His First English Words, we hear from the 3rd party in that equation—not the parent who sent their child to a safer haven, not the child who experienced this emigration, but from one woman, a Catholic widow, safe in her home 40 miles north of New York City, who does the thing she thinks everyone ought to be doing; she takes in a Jewish refugee child. Grace knows very little of this child’s experience, culture, or language and she strives to find a way to connect.

This monologue stands alone as its own piece, but it also comes from the collection of shorts in the full-length play, The The Victory Garden Plays. It runs approximately 5 minutes, for a female actor, age 40s-60s.