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Leon was born a year after his parents met and married in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. Leon's father's first wife and their two daughters had been killed, and Leon's mother had lost her infant daughter to starvation. Some decades later, Leon and Arnold Richards would co-author a paper on the psychoanalytic significance of replacement children for the journal Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Leon's sister was born, and when Leon was three, his family moved to an egg farm in southern New Jersey. When Leon was eleven, his father, who had lived through four heart attacks, succumbed to the fifth. Leon and his mother and sister moved to NYC. Leon was lanky and athletic. He loved bicycling, and his serious interests took him in unusual directions. He graduated from City College and received a master's in international relations, planning to pursue a career in diplomacy with a focus on Brazil. Thinking better of the idea, he decided to become a psychotherapist. He completed his doctorate at the Columbia University School of Social Work and did his analytic training at IPTAR, where, along with graduating in 1986, he met his future wife, Janet Fisher. Their daughter, Stephanie, was born on October 4, 1988, and their first grandchild, Liliana, was born on June 11, 2020.
Leon was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when he was twenty-three years old and lived with the disease for forty-nine years. His membership paper at IPTAR, which was published in Psychoanalytic Review, was revolutionary for its time. Leon wrote about the experience of being a disabled analyst and the effect a disabled analyst has on patients. Leon thwarted death again and again, arising, much as he was born, from the ashes. Leon's life, like his work, was creative, brave, and loving. Many of us on ROOM's editorial board knew him only in his last years through his thoughtful and avid contributions to our conversations. At the last editorial meeting Leon attended, he was thrilled to be feeling so well.