Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Barry Werth Looking backward was not part of Steve Luxenberg's upbringing. Growing up Jewish in a mostly Catholic neighborhood in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s, hiding his asthma from his high school basketball coach to avoid being benched, reaching Harvard on a scholarship, he took his cues from his striving parents and poor immigrant grandparents, who "seemed to have a collective amnesia about anything sad, tragic, or pre-American." "We heard no stories about life in the old country, and what's more, we didn't much care -- we were a modern American family, looking ahead rather than back, determined to make something of ourselves," Luxenberg, a longtime Post editor, recalls in "Annie's Ghosts," his probing, wise and affecting new memoir of family secrets and posthumous absolution. "The past wasn't just past. It was irrelevant." Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows the adage "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." In 1995, Luxenberg's 78-year-old widowed mother, Beth, who'd often lectured her children about the loneliness she suffered growing up as an only child, confessed to a social worker that she'd had a sister who'd been institutionalized. Since Beth was sick and depressed and near death from emphysema, her eldest son never brought it up with her while she was alive. After her death, he decided to look into the life of this phantom aunt, Annie Cohen. The second daughter of Tillie and Hyman Cohen, Ukrainian immigrants, she was born in 1919 with a deformed leg and with mental challenges that today would classify her as borderline mentally disabled. The first secret that Luxenberg uncovered -- the one that would propel him to dig far beyond Annie's unhappy life to the "ghosts" of the title -- was that she'd been sent away not, as his mother told her social worker, when she was 2 and Beth 4, but after suffering a psychotic break when Annie was nearly 21 and Beth 23, unmarried and still living at home. Not only had Beth not been an only child, as Luxenberg himself had written in the obituary he prepared for the Detroit papers, but she also had lived up until adulthood under the same roof as Annie, along with the shame and stigma of having a damaged family member at a time when mental and physical deformities were poorly understood and worried over as darkly hereditary and reflective of everyone in the household. How was this possible? Why had his mother hidden Annie? Had his father known the secret? Who else knew? As Luxenberg wades into each question, the reader journeys with him not just into his family's past but also into the world they inhabited -- a world of secrets and lies and name changes (some at the hand of immigration officials, others intentional) that became deeply imbedded in his parents' generation's efforts to move ahead and assimilate. As Luxenberg discovers, his family buried tragedy not just because it was painful, but also because it could block the future. Without having his mother to ask, he structures his investigative quest around the fundamental question: Why? Why did his mother bury Annie 32 years before she died? His pursuit takes him through countless government offices and archives; to the homes of anyone who knew Beth Luxenberg in the 1930s and early '40s, when she was Bertha Cohen and living at home with a crippled sister; to experts on subjects from orthopedics to schizophrenia to the Holocaust; and ultimately, to the small town in Ukraine where his grandparents had grown up, apparently first cousins. Luxenberg is an exhaustive, meticulous reporter, and he worries about the things good reporters worry about: making too much of a fact or a connection; the failing memories of his sources, whom he invites to remember conversations and unspoken feelings a half-century old. He's consistently careful not to lead witnesses, lest they tell him what they think he wants to hear. He occasionally goes too far in describing the minutiae of his reporting challenges or else dumps his notes into an overlong digression on, say, the history of Detroit's mental hospitals and barbaric practices like insulin shock therapy that, in the end, Annie was fortunate to avoid. At the same time, he is Beth's son and Annie's nephew, and he has deep feelings about each new secret he uncovers and, I suspect, considerable awareness that he is a beneficiary of his mother's fierce determination not to be burdened by the past. Beth told her son often that she loved him. "Annie's Ghosts" is his elegy in return, a poignant investigative exercise, full of empathy and sorrowful truth.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Throughout her life, Luxenberg’s mother, Beth, reveled in her status as an only child. Then, a few years before her death in 1999—and utterly out of the blue—she admitted to having a mentally and physically disabled younger sister named Annie, who died in 1972. Beth’s failing health precluded Luxenberg and his siblings from learning any more. After Beth’s passing, Luxenberg set out in search of answers. His dual roles as reporter and son proved both blessing and curse; the journalist dug furiously for facts, while the son wondered if long-buried secrets were best kept that way. His questions were many: What prompted Annie’s commitment, at age 21, to Eloise Hospital, southeastern Michigan’s sprawling psychiatric facility? Why was there next to no record of her early years? Most baffling of all, why did Beth, two years Annie’s senior, refuse for so long to acknowledge her sibling’s existence? Armed with superb investigative skills and relentless determination, Washington Post senior editor Luxenberg tracked down remaining family and friends and interviewed an exhaustive list of experts who might shed light on Annie’s plight. Part memoir, part mystery, part history of the mental-health movement, Annie’s Ghosts is a fascinating account of a life lived in the shadows and a family beset by despair. --Allison Block

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (May 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401322476
• ISBN-13: 978-1401322472
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #164,775 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Choices, Secrets and Memories, June 18, 2009

By	ck "moonshadow" (Hawaii nei) - See all my reviews

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At what point do you stop controlling a secret and find that it's controlling you? That's one of the questions at the heart of Steve Luxenberg's utterly compelling first book, "Annie's Ghosts" Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret. Part memoir, part biography and part investigative reporting, this book humanizes a subject that probably touches more of us than we might realize.

Luxenberg's journey begins as a son's quest to learn why his mother turned her sibling from younger sister to lifelong secret and expands to become an exploration of a particularly moving era in recent American history.

Several months after Luxenberg's mom died, the cemetery where her parents were buried sent the family a letter containing a simple question that was to lead Luxenberg and his siblings on a journey through their family's past. "Spring was around the corner," Luxenberg writes, "and the cemetery was offering to plant flowers on the grave sites." The solicitation wasn't for two sites, however, but for three. Suddenly, this whisper of a woman had a name, Annie. Her burial certificate answered some questions, but led to others that took Luxenberg deep into the dynamics of his own family as well as the evolving nature of health care in the United States during several key decades of the 20th century.

He soon found himself part of a wave of thousands of family members seeking information about relatives who'd been institutionalized--relatives they'd never known they had. "I couldn't write about all the `forgotten people,' but I could write about one," Luxenberg writes of his decision to ferret out Annie's tale.

Steve Luxenberg is a veteran newspaperman, and his journalistic instincts and contacts definitely helped him develop questions and efficiently seek answers. However, he's also a son and a brother, and the decision to step outside the bounds of impartial reporter to involved memoirist and family historian cannot have been easy. His love for his mom and his family illuminates every chapter, even as he struggles with why his mom--who lived by the rule of honesty--chose to keep such a key element of her life a secret.

In the end, drawing on primary and secondary sources, and leavening these facts with his knowledge of his mom, he finds answers. Too late, as he notes in his dedication, for his mom and Annie ... but perhaps not for the other 5,000 whose families may still have time to reconnect.

I read this book twice. The first time, for the tale of Annie and the Luxenbergs; the second, for the larger historical picture. As I've written and rewritten this review, I've struggled with how to describe this book without spoiling the intensely personal journey it conveys. So I'll have to leave it at this. If you've ever loved or been loved, this book will hit you in the gut.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Layers upon layers upon layers, May 25, 2009

By	S. Lionel (NH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I won't repeat a synopsis of Annie's Ghosts - the "Product Description" does a good job of that. I will tell you what went through my mind as I read through this remarkable book.

As the blurb says, Luxenberg made good use of his journalistic skills to dig into the mystery that was his aunt, Annie. I was amazed at the resources he was able to make use of, not the least was the welcome cooperation of government clerks who went out of their way to look for information. He also was able to locate and get the cooperation of relatives and friends of his mother, many of which he had never known or not seen since childhood.

What I wasn't expecting, from what I had heard of this book, were the side stories; about the history of how we treated the mentally ill in the early 1900s and how things would be different today for Annie, and about the Holocaust and the Russian execution of Jews. This last resonated with me because, like Luxenberg, I am the child of Jewish immigrants who fled the Holocaust and pogroms. I was amazed at the connections he was able to make and his luck, really, in not doing this even a few years later when many of his best sources would have likely been dead. It made me regret not learning more about my own family while I still could.

As the book progressed, and more and more secrets were revealed, it seemed to me that Luxenberg's quest was really more about him and desire to know as much as he could about his family. There's a lot of introspective prose which at times feels like filler. I also tripped over some places, mainly early in the book, where he quotes someone, a few paragraphs later repeats the quote, and then repeats it again on the next page. Since I was reading a pre-publication copy, it's possible that these will be trimmed out before release.

While Annie's Ghosts is not my usual reading fare, I found the story captivating and, like the author, I wanted to know what happened next. In the process, Luxenberg reveals some horrors about overwhelmed mental institutions of the early 20th century, despite the best intentions of the medical staff. People's attitudes towards physical and mental disabilities have changed less, however, and Luxenberg's story made me stop and think more than once. It's well worth reading.

A side note - I first heard about Annie's Ghosts when NPR interviewed the author. When I've heard these interviews in the past, I often marveled at how the host had managed to find the time to read the book they quoted from. But, perhaps in this case, it seemed that everything discussed was from the first 10 pages or so. Maybe that's their secret?

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Memoir, April 29, 2009

By	Sunny @ the Library "sunnyatthelibrary.com" (USA) - See all my reviews

The subject matter here is fascinating: the stuff of Hollywood films or interesting novels.

After his mother's death (and not from a "deathbed confession" as the book's current blurb claims), journalist Steve Luxenberg learns something startling -- He has an aunt.

Or rather, had.

A letter from a cemetery asking about routine maintenance for a grave helps Steve begin to coax this particular family skeleton out of the closet. See, his mother's sister, Annie, was institutionalized. And as much as Steve might try to justify the obvious shame and embarrassment (even hatred? resentment?) that his mother felt, his difficulties in rationalization increase when he discovers this wasn't some sister his mom barely knew, socked away as a child, or dying young -- Annie was institutionalized when Steve's mother was in her early 20s. His mother had spent a significant portion of her life living with Annie, and Annie didn't die young. She lived into her 50s. She must have been a fixture around the neighborhood. How had his mother kept this secret all these years, and why?

A journalist by trade, Steve begins investigating his own family history, immediately discovering the difficulties that even the state throws in the way of those who would like to learn more about its former wards. As Steve struggles to obtain records and interview family and friends, some of whom are dying before he can speak to them, the reader is along for an exciting ride. Steve's careful research on the institution Eloise, Annie's contemporaries' views on mental illness, and how a physical handicap (malformed leg) might have affected Annie, absolutely shine.

However, at some point the memoir shifts focus, partially because the information Steve can gather about Annie is, ultimately, sparse, and the burning question Steve tries to answer becomes not, "Who was Annie?" but, "Did my Dad know?" While the author barely accepts what his mother has done (and he only accepts it because it is the bare truth) he seems horrified that his father might have been complicit too. It becomes a bit of an obsession and is also when the story loses my interest a little. However, it comes late enough in this otherwise engaging investigation for the reader to already be invested, and carries through to a strong finish.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed reading Annie's Ghosts. I had a very hard time putting it down and read it in as few sittings as possible. It is certainly a great narrative that I will be haunted by for years to come.