Diane L. Redleaf, Poet/Essayist/Short Story Writer
(My latest poetry collection Odes to the States is out! Click here).
Diane L. Redleaf, Poet/Essayist/Short Story Writer
(My latest poetry collection Odes to the States is out! Click here).
Welcome to my writer's web page. Here I share my poetry and occasional fiction, memoirs, and essays.
See www.familydefenseconsulting.com for information about my family advocacy and non-fiction writing about child welfare/family regulation system topics.
Poetry
Poems that have been published elsewhere are republished here. The poetry blog page includes poems that I have either self-published or am publishing for the first time there.
My new collection Odes to the States is out in an Amazon eBook format. If you want a clickable or your own PDF, version, please contact me. on the contact form here. To help defray the cost of production, I'm requesting
My poem Delaware (below) is being published in Highland Park Poetry's new collection "Road Trips". I also have been invited to do a reading from the collection for Highland Park Poetry in Feburary 2025. Stay tuned!
Here is the first review of my chapbook, What Can Be Held Briefly, published in the Highland Park Poetry's Newsletter on January 3, 2023: http://www.highlandparkpoetry.org/reviewsthanks.html.
My chapbook is available through independent book sellers at this link: https://books2read.com/u/3LVpvD
DELAWARE
I nearly missed you, oh Delaware,
when I zipped right through you.
Because I easily could,
despite Wilmington,
despite mansions nearly as big as you,
despite bays and tunnels,
despite your constitutional firstness,
your outsized sway,
presidential presumption,
richly endowed corporate personhood,
outclassing all the big square flyovers
with your puny nine-mile wideness.
Pipsqueak!
You play so nicely with your noisier big cousins.
Though they barely notice you
until they need you,
like a tax shelter,
an LLC,
or a gallon of gas on I-95.
Before Autocracy
Once she had a free voice:
She sang and sang without thinking twice.
Once she had a free pen:
She wrote with it again and again.
Once she had a free mind:
She respected others, strove to be kind.
Once she had the world to see:
She faced life flush with opportunity.
Once—so free—she didn’t realize:
She sees better now, with better eyes.
(Published by Highland Park Poetry, December 2022, Poets Respond feature).
Ode to the Family Destruction System: They Decided Not to Listen to Her
By Diane Redleaf
They decided that she was a mess.
They slapped on labels:
addict,
crazy,
hopeless case.
And she was a black woman, too.
So she could hardly force anyone to listen
in the years before anyone thought to be
“trauma-informed”
or thought that
a black momma mattered.
It’s unclear, looking at case records,
whether a single person
listened along her way.
And by the time her son knew of her struggles,
he could see them listening to his dad,
not her,
as they claimed righteous concern for his welfare,
keeping him away from her.
He wanted to shout to them,
Including the one in black robes,
“Listen to her; she’s worthy, too!”
But he was too young to
articulate the point:
that claims about caring for children
ring hollow
when uttered by the mouths
of those who hate their mommas—
the ones who have decided that
they can manage a child’s welfare
without reckoning with so intangible a thing
as a mother’s love.Note: This poem was published here, thanks to Jey Rajaraman, my friend and colleague. I was inspired to write this poem after hearing the story of Titus Smith, a member of the LSNJ Reunified Youth Foster Forum, told at the National Alliance for Parent Representation Conference (workshop on Keeping Families Strong: Pre-petition Representation as an Anti-Racist Strategy), May 20, 2021. The poem was reprinted in the inaugural issue of the Public Knowledge's Family Integrity and Justice Works Quarterly at p. 72.
James Norman
He worked hard.
Proud--he wasn’t prone to seek help.
Does that matter
when he has no food in his broken refrigerator?
His daughters are ages 12 and 10.
His wife died a few years before.
The steel mill where he once worked is shut now.
Naturally someone calls child protection.
You would just want to buy him some food,
the Director looked back, explaining.
Then you realize, don’t you? that you need to
understand his whole etiology.
By that, she meant
the State should leave him,
a Black father, to manage on his own,
then take his girls to an emergency shelter,
move them from place to place,
and keep them at a distance
so the State could assess
what factors caused his lack of food
for his girls.
He is hungry.
Winter is coming.
He scrounges up some occasional bus fare
to see his daughters,
applies for disability benefits for a weak heart
he kept hidden from himself.
He finds lawyers to file petitions
saying the right legal words so the girls will come home.
All is set for a happy ending.
But he drops dead before the verdict.
Now there’s a chapter in a book
about his broken heart.
A class action judgment bears James Norman’s name.
It clarifies that food helps parents feed their children.
Though the Supreme Court soon called such claims
unenforceable.James Norman’s full etiology remains unknown.
It lies buried beneath the shuttered steel mills
or beside his wife’s grave
somewhere on Chicago’s South Side. snj.org/ode-to-the-family-destruction-system.aspx
ENDNOTES:
“James Norman.” This poem won Honorable Mention in the Oprelle 2022 "Into Piece Contest." and it is published on the contest announcement site. I'm excited to report that I have won fourth place in the Oprelle Masters' Contest and poems I submitted to the contest will be published in an anthology of poems by the five winners.
Here is more background on this poem. This information about the real life "back story" to this poem along with and a fuller collection of poems about the family regulation system will be published in my second poetry collection They Took The Kids and Called it Helping.
There is a chapter in R. Wexler, Wounded Innocents (Prometheus Books, 1990) about James Norman. See also, https://www.familydefenseconsulting.com/features (interview with Richard Wexler, including discussion of my first introduction to him and his initial writing about the Norman case). The Norman class action suit was filed in 1989 and first named Fields v. Johnson. It was renamed Norman v. Johnson after James Norman died while the litigation was pending. Reported decisions by the federal court can be found under the case names Norman v. Johnson, 739 F. Supp. 1182 (N. D. Ill. 1990)(class preliminary injunction opinion) and Norman v. McDonald, 930 F. Supp.1230 (N. D. Ill. 1996)(compliance enforcement opinion). More recently, I discussed the Norman case in this article, “The Biden Administration’s Focus Should be on Removing Poverty From Neglect,” The Imprint (Dec. 21, 2020). This article was followed by one by Jess McDonald, the Defendant Director of DCFS who settled the Norman suit with a commitment to cutting-edge cash and housing support programs, and Tom Morton, former Director of the child welfare agency in Clark County, Nevada, “America Must Change Its View of Poverty and Neglect,” The Imprint, Feb. 15, 2021, that also references the importance of the Norman case. My article references the Cook County DCFS Director’s deposition in the suit, where she explained why the agency didn’t just buy James Norman a bag of groceries.
But after the first federal court order the Supreme Court in Artist M. v. Suter, 503 U.S. 347 (1992) declared that the statutory duty to make “reasonable efforts” to prevent children from being removed from their homes or to return them home could not be enforced in a civil rights suit, finding no “private right of action. Advocates continue to be able to argue in state courts that reasonable efforts are required, but cannot pursue such claims in the same way James Norman did—through a federal class action suit challenging state policies and practices.
With me on the Norman case and dogged in their pursuit of justice for James Norman and many other families were Laurene (“Rene”) Heybach, Susan Wishnick and Joan Matlack. And the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, headed by Ruth White, was created in part on the inspiration of the Norman case. NCHCW does outstanding work to advocate for housing resources to reunite families like James Norman’s.
Too Much
Too hot to walk outside today;
too muggy sometimes not to sweat;
too cloudy to walk without hitting rain;
too buggy I fear to attempt in woods.
Too frightening to try in crowded streets;
too lonely to walk too far alone;
too tricky to walk 6 feet away;
too familiar to have anywhere new to go.
Too tired sometimes to want to go;
too lethargic often to leave the couch;
but too busy on good days to have much time;
with too little planning for the needed pause.
Too many options closed for too long;
too many days turning into the next;
too many old ways fading into memory;
and too much uncertainty about what will come back.
But never too grateful for all that is left,
for food, for home, for family, and friends,
for occupations, hobbies, books, and dreams,
and sweet working legs and eyes.
Gratitude overflowing, while the daily count of the fallen becomes
too many, too many, and too many more.
This poem was published in the Oak Park Wednesday Journal on September 2, 2020,
ESSAYS AND SHORT STORIES
Our Immigrant Voices: Anatoly Libgober
After hearing temple member Marisol Guzman’s heartbreaking refugee story, the Har Zion Social Action Committee decided to ask other congregants to share their stories.
Generations
Here is Anatoly Libgober’s story, inspired by two significant photographs.
Photos in the Family Archives
By Diane L. Redleaf
A sunny-faced young man reaches out his hand to an older, matronly-looking woman. They both appear filled with resolve and delight. His new life is beginning. Her power is at its fullest, its most confident.
The young man in the photograph is Anatoly Libgober. He is my husband, though the photo was taken 11 years before I met him.
The older woman in the photograph is Golda Meir, Prime Minister of the State of Israel.
Anatoly met Golda Meir in the summer of 1973. Just a few weeks before the photo was taken, Anatoly, then a 24-year-old aspiring mathematician, had been expelled from the Soviet Union. In the photo of his meeting with the Prime Minister, his energetic face shines out under his telltale mound of curly hair. He’s beaming rainbows. No wonder: Anatoly just became a lucky victor in a Superpower showdown. A part of the Refusnik movement, Anatoly was an early and unlikely winner in a geopolitical game of chess. And now, for a brief period of time, Anatoly was an international celebrity.
Anatoly’s epic release from the Soviet Union came after world historical tragedies mounted throughout his parents and grandparent’s lives. When Anatoly’s father was 9 years old, his 19-year-old brother was killed in a pogrom. His mother’s father as well as the uncle for whom Anatoly is named were murdered in Stalin’s Great Terror in around 1937 (the exact date is still not known precisely). His father’s parents were both slaughtered in a mass killing orchestrated by the Nazis, carried out by their Ukrainian minions, during World War II. Only one of Anatoly’s grandparents, his mother’s mother, was alive when Anatoly was born. She, too, suffered greatly, for she was labeled an “enemy of the people” and lived in internal exile, banished from Moscow.
Raised in the wake of such upheaval, violence, and fear, intellectual pursuits provided comfort, hope, and a path forward. From his earliest ages, Anatoly’s mother, a high school math teacher, instilled in Anatoly the love of mathematics, the same love that eventually would force his decision to leave the country into which he was born.
One day, when Anatoly was 11 years old, a group of his mother’s math colleagues got together, talking about a hard geometric proof. “Who knows the answer?” his mother queried the others. No one did. But Anatoly, listening in, found the proof. From that day on, Anatoly’s mathematical gifts were clear to everyone. So was his love of mathematics. At age 71, it is still one of his most infectious and joyful qualities.
Anatoly finished high school at age 15 and accelerated his college studies through night classes, completing a masters’ degree by the time he was 21. At Moscow State University, he gained recommendations from two of the country’s leading mathematicians— professors of international renown. Nevertheless, Anatoly was not accepted into graduate school under the rigid Jewish quota. Only Jews with Communist Party backing made it. The exclusion from his dream of pursuing a life in mathematics forced his way into the Refusnik movement.
Stymied, Anatoly decided to emigrate. It wasn’t an easy process. He lost his job. He started to study Hebrew and, because the State required all citizens to register their employment, Anatoly registered himself as a “Hebrew teacher.” He went to jail after one of the many protests he attended. His father, already in his 60s, did not want to leave Russia. He too suffered a public denunciation and demotion after Anatoly applied for an exit visa.
While studying Hebrew and attending protests, Anatoly was invited to join a circle of older, better-established, Jewish scientists who were trying to get permission to leave the Soviet Union for freedom as Jews in Israel.
These scientists decided to call attention to their plight by going on a hunger strike to protest the Soviets’ refusal to allow their emigration to the Jewish homeland. The strike coincided with Chairman Brezhnev’s visit to the United States, timed in order to create maximum pressure and attention to the strikers’ demands.
On day 8 of the hunger strike, the KGB gave notice singling out Anatoly, the youngest of the seven and the least prominent of the group. He was directed to come in for questioning. The strikers held a tense internal debate.
“Should Anatoly go?” “Might he be exiled and never seen again?” they all wondered. He went.
And within four more days, day 12, Anatoly was on a plane to Vienna, and then on to Tel Aviv. He was the only one of the seven to be released during the strike.
When the strike ended, one of the strikers was exiled to a Siberian prison camp, as all the strikers feared might be their common fate. But months after the strike, the rest of the strikers were allowed to emigrate. Anatoly, however, left in a hurry all by himself, stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
He became a citizen of Israel, welcomed under Israel’s Law of Return. His mother, sister, and five-year-old niece followed him a month later. He entered the glorious and glistening free world in a time when leaving the Soviet Union was the dramatic stuff of movie thrillers.
Joining the hunger strike was risky, but not joining it could have been fatal to his future. Though never one to take avoidable risks, Anatoly staked his future on a life-or-death gamble that paid off.
When Anatoly arrived in Israel, the media attention he received was hardly familiar. Nor would he ever again experience such a display of public attention directed at him.
Though he soon would be embarking on a life of mathematical adventures all over the world, he would avoid media spotlights. He would save his public appearances for math conferences where talk of algebraic geometry, topology, and number theory would excite him even more than meeting a Prime Minister.
Indeed, Anatoly stayed shy about sharing both the story of his showdown with the Soviet authorities and the account of his reception in Israel. But one night after dinner at his apartment in Hyde Park, he asked me sweetly, “Did I tell you about this?” As if he had. And then he casually handed me a clipping from the Jerusalem Post with the photo of his meeting with Prime Minister Meir.
By then, he may have already been calling me “Dianushka,” a name that still sticks. Like others who know little of the Russian history that smoldered inside this shy, cerebral mathematician, I had no idea that Anatoly had been an international celebrity at the age of 24.
To this day, friends will ask Anatoly about his departure from Russia. Most of them aren’t too interested in hearing the full story, or are too shy themselves to ask much. Nor is Anatoly interested in notoriety. If friends ask him, “How did you get to leave Russia?” he’ll usually demur and mumble a platitude. “It was complicated.” They usually let the question drop. It was polite interest anyway, not a request for a Soviet history and politics lesson.
Closer friends often will try to talk to him about many things Russian. Bits of his expulsion story will come out. He doesn’t keep it secret, though he remains reticent and guarded about saying too much.
But one thing he is never shy about answering are the questions: “Do you want to go back to Russia?” “Have you gone back?” “Would you go?”
The answers are “No,” “No,” and “No!”
And when those questions are asked, the longer story will often come out.
✡✡✡✡✡✡✡
We met someone, once though, who knew Anatoly’s story immediately. One night in 1986, Anatoly and I were on a long vacation on the West Coast. It was the summer before we got married. After an international math conference in Berkeley, we headed for Los Angeles. We visited one of my good friends from law school who had settled there.
My friend, in turn, thought it would be nice if we met his friend Beth. But as soon as we came to my friend’s home and met Beth, she did a double-take as she stood face-to-face with Anatoly.
“I have a poster with your picture on the wall of my office,” Beth said. She was sure of it. “I have been looking at your face every day.”
I could not imagine how that could be true.
But it was true. It turned out that Beth worked for the Jewish Federation in Los Angeles. A poster of the 1973 hunger strikers was part of the ongoing “Let My People Go” campaign that Beth tirelessly staffed. So Beth had gotten to know the faces of each of the strikers, peering at her every day at work on the poster on her wall.
As it turned out, Anatoly and I owe just about everything to people like Beth. Without the organized Jewish community—all the Beths and the communities supporting them—Anatoly might never have been released from the Soviet Union. Without them, he might never have gotten to live his life pursuing non- Euclidean projective space, curves and manifolds, braid groups, and knots. He might instead be sitting in a Siberian labor camp.
And without the thousands of Jews around the world, organized by people like Beth, who pressed for the release of Soviet Jews, I might never have met my husband, formed my own family, or pieced together its Russian and American Jewish history from diverging strands of tragedy and good fortune.
And without people like Beth, neither of the photographs of my husband during or after the hunger strike would have made their way into my collection of personal memories, melding my own personal history with the world’s and its mysterious ways.
This essay was written for the writing group sponsored by Temple Har Zion during the pandemic, led by Elizabeth Liwazer. The prompt for the essay was to write about a photograph. The photo of Anatoly with Golda Meir was discussed in my first draft essay. But then the second photo was recalled and the revised essay grew to include the photo of the seven Refusniks that Beth had in her office.
For more information about the hunger strike, see:
“7 Soviet Jews Appeal for Worldwide Support,” The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/2LpugG7
“Six in Soviet Reject Plea to End Fast,” The New York Times: https://nyti.ms/2XezpDq
Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union: http://amzn.to/2Xg1dHJ
“Soviet Scientists End Hunger Strike”: http://bit.ly/38kVSoT
Here is a picture of the scientists who joined Anatoly on the hunger strike. (He is pictured in the first row, middle).
- September 13, 2022You hold your own bottle today until it gently slides from your lips. You do the unknown next. ...September 6, 2022He races down the canyon, as I lumber down like a mama bear from behind, with my...
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