The Power of Stories

I’ve noticed over the years that I get far more likes on social media for my personal posts than my political posts. Especially if the personal post is a happy one. It makes sense. On the whole, people would rather read something uplifting, poignant, or inspirational than the gloom and doom embedded in political messages, even when they convey what I think is important information or ask people to engage in a quick, painless action.

Because of this observation, I’ve generally been judicious about posting political content, even in these trying times. But lately I haven’t been able to help myself when nearly every day I come across another story of someone being wrongfully taken by ICE and sent to prison: sometimes here in the U.S. (although often thousands of miles away from their families), and sometimes to El Salvador, where the U.S. no longer has jurisdiction over their cases and torture and abuse are even more rampant.

In many of these cases, the people taken have no criminal record. In fact, they often have legal status: a green card, a visa, an asylum case pending. In nearly all of the El Salvador deportations, the people detained have been denied the opportunity to speak to an attorney or argue the charges against them in court. Instead they are quickly loaded, shackled onto a plane simply because someone has accused them (often based on a tattoo or hearsay evidence) of being a member of a gang.

In many cases, when ICE cannot find the person they are looking for, they make collateral arrests of whoever happens to be nearby. Sometimes these people are U.S. citizens, who are eventually released, but not until they’ve dealt with the trauma of spending several nights in jail. And those who aren’t citizens–hard-working people with no criminal record–enter the detention/deportation system, even if they have parole or asylum claims pending.

Even tourists have been arrested, strip-searched and sent to jail for visa mix-ups or under suspicion of plans to work illegally.

During this administration’s first term, when I wrote the stories in my collection Immigrants, I tried to envision the impact of DT’s policies on real people. While there were love stories that ended with deportation, a woman facing a dilemma of whether or not to bail out her housekeeper’s brother, and a mother in a squalid border encampment who sent her daughter over the bridge to the U.S. alone, there was a still a softness to the stories. I did not talk about the torture and abuse inherent in  detention facilities. I balanced these stories with others where immigrants played a positive and vital role in people’s everyday lives. And I took the stance that these people were victims in a system that had gone out of control due to misguided information and decision-making.

But in current times, these people are no longer victims; they’re prey. Deliberately hunted. Shredded. Devoured. And they don’t just include people who entered the U.S. without documentation. They’re people with legal status who are being imprisoned for writing op-eds or social media posts against the government’s point of view, or for organizing peaceful protests. Or they’re people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t feel like I can write any stories about immigrants any more because the true stories are too hard to read. And to write anything that waters down the truth is mitigating the effects of what is happening.

Yet, I know that as a writer, I have a responsibility to speak out.

So, on my Facebook feed, I’m posting these stories as I come across them. Most are from Witness at the Border, a group I worked with when I went to the children’s detention center in Homestead Florida in 2019 and the Brownsville/Matamoros border in 2020. You can read quick summaries of some of these cases in this Axios article,  but it’s the power of detail in the actual stories that really strikes a chord. In my fiction collection, one of my goals was to change people’s hearts and minds by inviting them to really know the characters I wrote about. The stories profiled by Witness at the Border do just that. I’m hoping we can get past the sadness and disempowerment and channel the power of these stories as inspiration to take whatever actions we can to make this stop.

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Taking the Plunge

One of the parts of the Passover seder I resonate with most is the story of Nachsun. Nachsun was at the head of 600,000 Israelites running away from Pharaoh’s army when he came to the frothy waters of the Red Sea–the end of the road marked by angry waves and deep water stretching all the way out to the horizon.

But, rather than succumb and turn back to the horrors of slavery, Nachsun plunged into the water. And it was only after this courageous act that God told Moses to lift his staff and part the waters, enabling the rest of the Israelites to cross over on the dry path.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/st-stev/2432121049

According to some Biblical scholars, “Nachsun’s name has become synonymous with courage and the will to do the right thing,” even when it’s f*ing scary.

So, I’ve been thinking about Nachsun as I read as much as my stomach and soul will let me: ICE smashing car windows to make arrests, taking random people who have legal status when they can’t find the ones they were looking for, arresting a man at his citizenship appointment, and grabbing an international student off the streets for having views that differ with the government, and defying Supreme Court orders and refusing to return a man who was sent to a prison in El Salvador by errorIn fact, there has been no due process for anyone sent to prison in El Salvador, and now the government is threatening to send U.S. citizens there, as well.

These are only a few of the incidents. There are more people effected, and more stories. What I learned from visiting the border in 2020 is that everyone had a personal story that made me cry and tug at my hair and fall into an awe-struck paralysis where there just were no words to fathom the cruelty of human beings.

But the people I met in 2020 were fleeing cruelty in their countries of origin. Here in 2025, they–and we–are facing an equal if not greater cruelty from our country, our fellow Americans, people that we (collectively) elected, whose lawlessness we continue to enable each day with our fear and our silence, whether or not we voted for them.

So, I’m pondering… how can we… how can I… be like Nachsun and jump into the water. Even if it’s cold and rough. Even if my swimming ability is shaky.

How can I keep my head above the rough waters and shout, NOT IN MY NAME!

Not in my name as an American, and not in my name as a Jew who rejects the contorted use of antisemitism as an excuse for this barbaric behavior and understands that the definition of a concentration camp, “a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.” fits this situation far too well.

In the Passover liturgy, the word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, refers to “The Narrow Place,” and some of the observance consists of reflecting on how each of us as individuals can get past the obstacles that constrict us and emerge into a wider and more abundant state of being.

I’m thinking we need to do this as a country, maybe even as a species.

How can we stop being cruel? How can we jump into the water and believe that some hidden internal goodness–divinely inspired or otherwise–will save us?

Worrying

On the pre-visit questionnaire for a recent medical appointment, I once again came face-to-face with the familiar anxiety screening questions:

–Are you feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge?
–Are you worrying too much about different things?
–Are you feeling like you can’t stop or control your worrying?
–Are you feeling afraid, as if something awful might happen?

Though I dutifully clicked the “no” box for each of these questions, I wanted to add in a “but” and a nervous giggle. I knew I didn’t have what they were looking for in terms of clinical anxiety, but how could I not feel anxious, depressed and on edge every time I scroll social media, hear a blip on NPR, or open my email?

Vincent Le Moign, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

How could I not be worried?

And what weighs on me more: how do I balance my mental health by controlling worry, with the stories of people being literally kidnapped and sent to CECOT, a torturous prison in El Salvador. (Despite the media hype and MAGA speech about gang affiliations, 75% of the people in CECOT have no criminal history!)

How can I not worry when students are arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation for peaceful protesting, when visas of international students are revoked for no apparent cause, when long-time foreign residents are suddenly kicked out of the country?

How can I not worry when due process has been suspended and court orders are being ignored? And when collateral arrests in ICE raids include U.S. citizens with no rectification or apology?

How can I just let these stories slide off me like a momentary annoying wave that rolls out to sea as I continue with my life? And what’s happening to immigrants is only one of many disturbing developments since the new administration took office. How can I not worry about the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities? About women? About children in poverty?

Like many American Jews who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Even though my family wasn’t directly impacted, the stories were told: The Germans watched as the Jews were rounded up… marched off…

Of course there were many good people in Nazi Germany who risked their lives trying to help those who were targeted. And I don’t believe the rest were all bad people. I’m sure there were some who naively believed the lies being told. And there were probably others who were told not to worry. Take care of yourself. As we’re being told every day. Even by our colleagues in the activist world.

I know I do need to take care of myself–and that spending more time worrying is not going to help. But the same perfectionist tendency that tries to rule my artistic life has been clawing at my activist self. If I’m not doing everything I could possibly do at this moment as perfectly as possible, than I’m likely not doing enough, it tells me. So the conundrum is figuring out ways to do even more than I’m doing and to be as effective as possible, without succumbing to the paralyzing guilt of perfectionist demands that minimizes the impact of my actions and just leads to more worrying.

As much as I like this video, the Bobby McFerrin song,  “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” doesn’t seem to apply right now. I need to worry AND I need be happy, but not so worried or so happy that I don’t take every opportunity I can to act.

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Hopelessness is Not an Option

Soon after the presidential election in 2016, I told myself complacency was no longer an option. This “mantra” became my modus operandi as I struggled to figure out what I could do to stop the nightmare. I had taken a break from political activism in the proceeding years, prioritizing writing in the small spaces I had left after my demanding day job. But all of a sudden I was thrown into reading all the political pundits I could get my hands on, searching for some tidbit of info that would tell me what we needed to do to stop the MAGA agenda. There had to be some magic formula–and those folks who were smarter and more in the thick of things had to know what to do.

But, alas, no easy recipes. Everyone–activists, super-activists, previously dormant activists, and non-activists–much as we railed about the state of affairs, seemed clueless about how to put a stop to it.

Since complacency wasn’t an option, I tried to do what I could. I went to dozens of political meetings and started, with the help of my daughter and son-in-law, a weekly call-to-action blog called “3 NoTrump,” which highlighted three simple civic actions people could take in response to unfolding events. I called my MoCs almost daily; I went to countless demonstrations. And while I appreciated myself for not being complacent, none of it seemed very useful.

A year or two later, things fell more into place with my personal activism. While our  3NoTrump blog folded after we never got much traction and no longer had the energy to keep it going, I joined a larger team that wrote for Rogan’s List, another call-to-action site that has recently reached its 50,000th subscriber. And I was able to join with an affinity group of like-minded people who were devoted to immigration justice. Together we went to a children’s detention center in Homestead, Florida, and to the Brownsville/ Matamoros border, each time sharing stories about what we had witnessed in community presentations and written media. These two focuses became the foundation of my current activism. And while we still didn’t stop everything, I’d like to think we made at least a small difference in raising awareness and inspiring people to action.

Refugee Camp: Matamoros, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

By the time of the 2024 election, I was still active in both these efforts, so I didn’t have to worry about complacency. But I had a new enemy: hopelessness.

In addition to many good reasons to feel hopeless (which I don’t have to depress people by outlining) I’ve figured out that my personal hopelessness is exacerbated by my general lack of patience. Heck, I get impatient if there’s someone ahead of me in line or if the computer takes more than five seconds to reload. My partner Shel always says he retains his optimism by seeing how much progress has been made over the years, despite backlash and pushback–MLK’s long arc bending toward justice. But patience is a mixed bag and it’s also good not to be too patient, IMHO. While many campaigns for progress (abolition and civil rights, for example) were eventually successful, they were also excruciatingly long and many people were hurt or killed before change happened.

I think that’s why it’s hard to conjure up patience. The stakes are too high, and, just like in 2016, what I really want is to find someone who can “fix it.”

But ultimately the only one who can “fix it” is me. You. All of us.

Deportation Plane, Brownsville, TX, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

And we can’t fix anything by being hopeless.

Thinking about hopelessness also brings me back to our trip to the border in 2019–how the people we talked with, thousands of them waiting months for an appointment at a tent court where only 1% would be granted asylum, didn’t lose hope. They stayed in the squalid and dangerous tent camp waiting and hoping, because to return, for many, would mean death–for themselves and their families.

Hopelessness wasn’t an option for them. It can’t be an option for me.

Refugee Camp, Matamoros, 2019. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

 

 

 

 

We’re Still Here: Happy New Year of the Trees

Today is my favorite Jewish holiday,  Tu B’shevat, The New Year of the Trees.

Why do I like this holiday so much? It doesn’t have a back story about war and destruction or about celebrating a so-called “victory” after taking sides. It’s simply about celebrating trees. And I have a thing for trees.

Nine years ago on Tu B’shevat, my friends and I gathered to have a 100th birthday party for the tree in my front yard, which we know was planted in 1916 when our house was moved several hundred feet by horse and winch from where it previously stood. It’s definitely an elder now and we watch it every year with loving care. We’re glad it’s still standing.

And five years ago, on Tu B’shevat, I was at the Brownsville/Matamoros border, leading writing workshops for women and teenagers who were stuck waiting in Mexico for a months or years to be called for a tiny number of daily asylum appointments. As a prompt for the workshop, we read a book called Somos Como las Nubes, (We Are Like the Clouds), a collection poems by young people about their journey north and their hopes and dreams of a better life.

These children (and the adults that accompanied them) may have thought they were like the clouds. But they were also like trees. Rooted in an unshakable hope. Then and now, I am amazed at their steadfastness and resilience, especially as I think back on the stories they told me of the violence they faced. I continue to be haunted by the pictures on their phones they showed me of loved ones covered in blood.

Friends, these are the stories of many of the people who are being rooted out, separated from their families, shackled and put on planes, or sent to places like Guantanamo Bay.

It breaks my heart. And while it doesn’t minimize the impact of the wrongs being done, I take small solace that trees are still standing.

In fact, when I start feeling anxious and fearful about the end of democracy, I think of the trees all over the world who have lived through wars, genocide, dictatorships…

How do they do it, and what lessons can I learn from them?

It’s only been in the past few years that I read that trees communicate with each other through a complex underground network of fungi to warn each other against insect attacks and other dangers. Somehow, I don’t think they discriminate about which trees to warn and which not to warn, which to welcome, and which to keep out.

Trees, like humans, need community. And tonight, I will celebrate Tu B’shevat tonight in community, where we’ll eat different kinds of tree products (fruit and nuts) and talk about the cycles of life and the seasons. But mostly what I’ll celebrate is that trees are still here–and we’re still here, which I’ve learned has become a theme song on many people’s “getting through dark times” playlists. As a total luddite when it comes to pop culture, I’m not even sure which I’m Still Here song is getting all the play. But here’s a rap I found that I like by Lathan Warlick; and here’s a Holly Near favorite with the slightly altered title of We’re Still Here.

Let’s keep on being here–warning each other against danger, and taking care of each other.

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Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

The day I arrived in New York to help deal with my father’s medical emergency, they were repairing the sewer pipe under my parents’ house.

The onslaught of noise was deafening as workers cut through an entire square of concrete then lowered themselves into the cavernous maze of underground pipes to search for the blockage. It took them two days to find the troubled spot, which had already plagued my parents for a week: no showers, no laundry, minimal dishwashing, and a directive to flush the toilet only when absolutely necessary. And after all that noise and digging, the blockage turned out to be not in the area where they’d dug at all. They found the problem in the sad little brick-enclosed square of dirt my parents call the “front yard”–under a rosebush that had already been reduced to small rootball and a few aspiring fronds.

The next day, when my father was officially referred to hospice and people rained all that “death is a passage” stuff on us, I thought about that sewer pipe–also a passage. And I also thought about the Dylan Thomas villanelle and its repeating haunting lines: Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It isn’t that I want my father to fight against the reality of his dying. I feel grateful that he is not–and has never been–an angry or vengeful person. Even in his compromised state, while depressed about what is happening, he continues to exude kindness and express love and gratitude to those around him.

But I feel like raging. Not at the inevitability of my father’s death, but at the sadness of seeing him so frail and unable to do things for himself–the “dying” of my image of my 90+ year-old parents as timeless icons of longevity.

And I feel myself raging against the barely flickering “light” of my country. Yet this rage feels like a fruitless kick-the-floor-and-flail-my-arms temper tantrum. Pundits tell us to keep breathing and find joy. The sun is brilliant on the half-inch of freshly fallen snow today. But where is the balance between digging and doing what we can and totally abandoning ship, closing our doors and taking out whatever might constitute our modern-day “opium pipe” to lose ourselves in a stupor of disempowerment and apathy.

I’m forever grateful to Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde, who was able to channel her rage into a calm and quiet plea for mercy, focusing the whole time she spoke, toward whatever light might be left that’s still shining on who we could be–individually and collectively. And I’m wondering if that’s the kind of light that flashes before our eyes as we near the end of our lives in addition to reliving all of our life’s significant moments. I’m wondering what my father, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is thinking as he sits hooked up to his oxygen machine with the New York Times spread on his lap, trying to stay awake long enough to get through more than a paragraph and make sense of all that’s happening around him.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

While we all have to accept death, as hard as it is, we mustn’t go gentle into this dark time, or accept the numerous attacks on our Constitution as the legitimate prerogative of a new leader. I feel grateful for the many in our community who are joining together and channeling their quiet rage into action. Death may be a lonely endeavor, but raging can be a community enterprise. I’m grateful to the many who are standing up to support immigrants, transgender people, the environment, and the many other important issues that are under attack.

In fact, what keeps me finding joy is knowing I have community–both to support me during this difficult personal time and to work together on keeping the light shining.

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Submission Milestones for 2024

Each year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve included an end-of-year submission stats post, just to shed some light on the nitty-gritty of this murky game. Here’s what happened for me in 2024.

POETRY:

20 Journals/Anthologies accepted 34 poems. I also got 91 poetry rejections.

Of the 34 poems accepted, 7 were taken on the very first go-round; 8 poems were previously rejected 1-3 times; 7 poems were rejected 4-7 times; 4 were rejected 9-12 times; 3 were rejected 15-20 times, and 1 had been previously rejected 31 times! (The other 4 poems were previously published, so I didn’t track that stat.) This surprised me, as usually my poems circulate more before someone picks them up. I’m wondering if I might be getting better at selecting poems I send out and matching them to journals.

Another thing of note is that of the 20 journals that accepted my work, 8 of them had previously published something of mine in the past, so I may have been more of a known quantity. But this is a great point for anyone playing the submission game. Establishing relationships with journals and editors who like your work can be extremely gratifying and also help soften the rejections from some of the more competitive journals on your reach list. And as long as the journals you’re published in put out a good quality product, who cares that they’re not the creme de la creme in the journal world. Your work is still getting read and appreciated!

FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION:

My fiction stats are a bit more depressing. I offered stories and essays to 23 journals, and only 1 got accepted: an op-ed in my local newspaper.

Some analysis on this:

–Stories and essays are often harder to publish because they take up more room in a publication. (5-10 pages vs. a 1-2 page poem).

–Most of my better stories were already published in my collection, IMMIGRANTS, so I’ve been only circulating a few newer ones. Before the book was published I did manage to publish around half of the stories it contained in various places, but it was slow going.

–I still tend to feel overall more confident in my fiction, and therefore I submitted  to a greater number of “reach journals.”

AWARDS:

I’m personally very mixed on the “awards/contest” game for books because it seems like mostly a way of collecting a lot of exorbitant entry fees just to say your book won an award, but my publisher and I did submit to a couple of the more known ones. I was pleased to get a finalist designation (first runner up short-story and all category short-list) for the Eric Hoffer Awards, and a finalist designation in the short story category for the Independent Authors Network.

I also received two Pushcart Prize and two Best-of-the-Net nominations from various journal editors.

And I did not win a few other notable things, like an IPPY Award.

LARGER PROJECTS:

It was a thrill to have my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, which drew heavily on my witnessing trips to the border and the children’s detention center in Homestead, FL, come out in early 2024. With the upcoming administration’s about to take over and put their extreme deportation plans in gear, this book feels even more relevant right now, and I’m continuing to look for ways to publicize it.

I did not spend a lot of time circulating my music memoir or any of my novels. But I did receive three rejections (aka non-responses) from agents, and one non-response from a small press where I sent one of my older kid-lit novels.) So this might be an area ripe for New Year’s resolutions in 2025.

Nevertheless, I easily crossed the 100-rejection threshold (91 poetry rejections, 22 fiction/CNF rejections, and 4 agent/small press rejections) for a grand total of 117!

Onward to 2025!

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Holding the Stories of Others

In 2014, I visited the Galilee, and stayed with one of three Jewish families in the Druze village of Peki’in. They were an older couple, Holocaust survivors from the Netherlands, and they lived right next door to the carob tree that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Jewish mystical book, the Kabbalah, supposedly subsisted on for 13 years when he fled the Romans and had to hide out in a cave.

In addition to visiting the tree, we visited a “national park” nearby, which was mostly filled with scrubby desert flora. But in the middle of the area sat an old stone church, and in front of the church sat an old man wearing a keffiyeh. Our host asked the man why he was there and the man told us his story. He had been 11 years old in 1948 when the Israeli soldiers came into his village. They told his mother she had to leave–for just a couple of weeks, they said. They needed to do some work and then it would be fine to return. They could leave most of their things–no need to take the donkey.

When they returned, the entire village had been razed. Only the church was left standing. Later the government turned the area into a national park, ironically charging admission for this man to enter his own village, where he sat day after day on a one-person vigil to commemorate what had happened to his home.

Later that night, our host told his story. He’d been a “hidden child,” sheltered by a Christian family during the war. But the trauma of being left by his parents (who ended up killed in the death camps) had never fully subsided.

Last night I went to hear a reading and talk from the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who, in response to a question about the value of writing poems at times of such death and devastation, said that as poets we need to hang on to the stories–and we have a responsibility to tell them.

Mosab Abu Toha’s work does just that. He portrays Gaza through the lens of the people that live there. I think this is one of the reasons that poet Audre Lorde said, Poetry is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, the quote that begins Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise.

When I went to the border in early 2020, I heard many stories from people that kept me awake at night, and kept me crying for days and weeks after I returned. I wrote poems about some of these stories; and I also wrote poems about the man in front of the Church in the Galilee and our Holocaust survivor host in Peki’in. But I continue to worry that capturing these stories in poems is not enough. For weeks, months, and even now, all of us on the border trip have continued to feel the weight of these stories. How can we keep ourselves healthy and lean into joy without discounting or ignoring the moral imperative for action that these stories should lead us to?

And how do we untangle the knots when stories contradict each other? How can we move into a space that rejects the idea of right and wrong, a space that has no sides?

My friend and compañera on the border trip carried this sign everywhere she went.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

May it be so. B’aruch Ha’Shem. Inshallah.

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