"Such breadth of knowledge and acuity of legal but also movement strategy" -Leila Z

I spent most of the time I’ve known Vanessa over Christmas holidays at the family house in Hastings-on-Hudson and in whirlwind travels through Latin American cities. The first time I met her was on my twenty-eighth birthday, in Santiago, Chile, where Rebecca and I had moved on something like a romantic whim, one year after we started dating. I noticed these two very tall figures (Steven and Darrow, obviously), and then from behind them Vanessa stepped out with a big smile on her face. I was pretty nervous, because from the very beginning I knew how close Rebecca was to her mom, how much she loved her but also how much she craved her approval, which I worried would be difficult to come by. But I was wrong. Without missing a beat, she started talking to me about the architectural style of the church across the street, and from there we were on to the political history of the Church during the days of the military dictatorship (Vanessa, like her daughter, has always had an absolutely luminous intellect, there really being almost no topic she can’t discuss knowledgeably but also with a sense of humor, wonder and curiosity). Immediately, I felt like I had an interlocutor, a genuinely passionate woman to look up to from a generation associated more and more with affluent complacent narcissism, and I also felt accepted by her, which was such a gift for me at the time, with all my insecurities and anguished uncertainty about who I was, flimsily concealed by bravado. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t always challenging me, which I never took as coming from a place of criticism but as motivated by real care and a desire to see everyone live a life in accordance with their potential for happiness but also for being of service to something higher than themselves. Over the course of those first few days we spent together (ending on New Year’s Eve in Valparaíso, with Vanessa wearing a silly hat while we drank pisco sours), I got the sense that she wanted to know what the fuck we were doing in Chile, in a corridor of mountains and sea, at the very end of the Earth. She so clearly loved and cherished Rebecca, and I felt that affection transferred to me, as someone who was very important to her daughter. She didn’t want to see Rebecca waste time, or worse, be unhappy. At the same time, it was always clear to me that she was fond of our romanticism, our willingness to adventure, our love of art and our political convictions. She saw the halo of our youth much more clearly than we did at the time, with a kind of melancholy appreciation that I now understand from the other side.

Vanessa has a fiery intellectual energy that I’m guessing she got in part from her father but that meant a lot more to me because she so clearly did not have patience for the intellectual preening and elitism that men often have, and she always wanted to know what could be done with ideas, with art. I’ll always remember being in Mexico City with her, where she was going to be a speaker at a law conference on immigration. We spent so many hours, days, that trip rapt in conversation, these really heady conversations about art and history inspired by the beauty of our surroundings. But also it could be a pain trying to get Vanessa to pay attention to mundane things like getting our first meal of the day before nine p.m., or realizing that we couldn’t see every last site in Mexico City (that’s what it was like traveling with Rebecca, too, I forget how many countries Rebecca and I saw together but it was more than twenty, possibly thirty). I think she wanted to go to Chapultepec the day of the conference, if I remember correctly, and of course we were late, Steven, Rebecca, and I scrambling to help her get ready and catch a taxi to the hotel. I actually was a bit worried that she wouldn’t know what to say, hadn’t prepared, which obviously showed that I still underestimated her, because when she sat down at the conference table, surrounded by lawyers and law students two or three decades younger than her, she spoke with such authority, such invective against unjust systems, such breadth of knowledge and acuity of legal but also movement strategy (Vanessa has devoted her life to law but she is also deeply aware that true power rests with people, with collective action). Everyone in the room was so obviously moved by her speech, by the clear-sighted composure she was keeping in the face of a situation that was becoming more and more violent and fascist every year, in which so many lives were at stake. Vanessa has such a rapport with young people, and the energy to match. She’s a teacher at heart, which is why it never would have made sense for her to focus on either the law clinic or the classroom, even if choosing might have been better for her health, since there’s pedagogy in everything she does, as well as concrete urgency. It was so important to me to have her as a guide during the years that I myself was deeply involved in immigration activism. I saw how she was able to always keep sight of the fact that abstractions were not really abstract, that politics was a matter of life or death but also of injustice versus human flourishing and community. I got a window into her work as an immigration lawyer and knew that the reason she worked so hard was that she was able through her work to save so many people from death, femicide, incarceration, poverty, separation from family, from loved ones and from autonomy. This helped me realize that there had to be more than abstract revolutionary sentiment or theorizing, that all this was pointless if it wasn’t rooted in practical work, which is so close (since I know Vanessa had a left-wing Catholic phase in her youth) to faith, to love.

The other side of Vanessa, the more intimate one I saw at home, over the holidays, cared so deeply about her family, loved the rhythms and the rituals of her hometown, found happiness in little things like eggnog, silly board games, the Christmas lights in Hastings. I love the way Vanessa would smile at me with a kind of complicity when someone else was being mildly annoying or self-involved. It never felt mean, it reminded me of how my Jewish grandparents would smile at me, always aware that we are subject to folly but worthy of grace. The way she and Steven have of caring for each other, even in the midst of argument, is so gentle, it helped rest my nervous system and reminded me that partnership doesn’t have to be toxic or high-pressure after so many years of seeing my parents in an abusive, awful marriage. For a while, Vanessa was like a second mom to me, and the family she so generously invited me into was in many ways more family than my own at a very difficult time in my life. I haven’t been able to keep up with her in recent years, with the chaos and vicissitudes of our personal lives and of the situation in the world. But I know she’ll always be with me, as a guide, a mentor, and a friend.

Leila Z