Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

by Steve Luxenberg

Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Or so everyone thought. Six months after Beth's death, her secret emerged. It had a Annie.

Praise for Annie's Ghosts

" Annie's Ghosts is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read . . . From mental institutions to the Holocaust, from mothers and fathers to children and childhood, with its mysteries, sadness, and joy--this book is one emotional ride."--Bob Woodward, author of The War Within and State of Denial

"Steve Luxenberg sleuths his family's hidden history with the skills of an investigative reporter, the instincts of a mystery writer, and the sympathy of a loving son. His rediscovery of one lost woman illuminates the shocking fate of thousands of Americans who disappeared just a generation ago."--Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange and Confederates in the Attic

"I started reading within minutes of picking up this book, and was instantly mesmerized. It's a riveting detective story, a moving family saga, an enlightening if heartbreaking chapter in the history of America's treatment of people born with what we now call special needs." -- Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand and You're Wearing That

"This is a memoir that pushes the journalistic envelope . . . Luxenberg has written a fascinating personal story as well as a report on our communal response to the mentally ill." -- Helen Epstein, author of Where She Came From and Children of the Holocaust

"A wise, affecting new memoir of family secrets and posthumous absolution." -- The Washington Post

" Annie's Ghosts will resonate for many, whether the chords have to do with family secrets, the Depression, memories of a thriving Detroit, the Holocaust's horrors, or the immigrant experience." -- The Detroit Free Press

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Book Club, Biography, History, Biography Memoir, Mystery

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Steve Luxenberg, a Washington Post associate editor, is an award-winning author and journalist. During 30+ years with The Post, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Twitter: @sluxenberg.

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation, his second book, was published in Feb. 2019 (W.W. Norton). It was named a New York Times Editor's Choice, and a Best Book of the Month by both Amazon and Goodreads. As a work in progress, Separate won the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Award for excellence in nonfiction writing.

Reviews have praised the book's deep research and storytelling. “Absorbing," wrote James Goodman in The New York Times Book Review, "so many surprises, absurdities and ironies. . . . Segregation is not one story but many. Luxenberg has written his with energy, elegance and a heart aching for a world without it.”

Early praise for Separate came from Katherine Boo, bestselling author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity ("deeply moving, devastatingly relevant"); Walter Isaacson, bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci ("Every paragraph resonates in today's headlines"); and Bob Woodward, author of Fear: Trump in the White House and other bestsellers ("a brilliant milestone in understanding the history of race relations in America").

Steve's first book was the critically-acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret (Hyperion/Hachette, 2009), chosen as a Michigan Notable Book and selected as the 2013-2014 Great Michigan Read. During that year, Annie’s Ghosts was the focus of a state-wide series of events and discussions. The Washington Post named it one of its "Best Books of 2009," and it was featured on NPR's All Things Considered.

A native of Detroit, Steve lives in Baltimore with his wife, Mary Jo Kirschman.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

O, that howling "cry of the disconsolate chimera"!
(T.S. Eliot)

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steve Luxenberg transfixed American readers in 2009 in this tell-all and grittily-written biography of his family’s dark secrets.

Dark secrets? Some people "must" choose not to resist existential neutering. Their chances of resistance are slim or none. My wife calls us, if you get her drift, the cast-off "cobailles" of society. I was one of ‘em.

It is atmospherically redolent of those noir thrillers Alfred Hitchcock pumped out in the forties and fifties as an American impetus towards healthier psychological hygiene and awareness.

And classics like Vertigo and Rear Window give but a mere glimpse of the humungous submerged iceberg that widespread psychiatric awareness was uncovering back then.

For that fifties nightmare The Snake Pit is much more to the point!

It was a huge monolithic structure of shared complicity, shared secrets, and Very Dark Realities.

And let’s never for a moment omit to think about how the criminally effective methodology used by the Soviet medical community for patient control became grist for the mill, via psychiatric journals, for the international medical community in the fifties.

As Dylan said, “what’s been did and what’s been hid.”

Such is the dark investigative nature of this book.

Here, you will descend, by degrees like Dante, into the dark and forbidding realities of a Hell into which so many sensitive Americans were then so remotely and clinically thrust, unknown to their loved ones.

Doctor knows best - or does he? All bets are off...

But with awareness, the windows of this primitive hell were finally opened, and its secrets humanized, beginning in the sixties.

There were many such ghosts, indeed, in the innocent world of Annie Cohen.

She lived with these “ghosts” most of her life, unknown to her family’s friends and their offspring, but to us enlightened readers nowadays, they are better represented as ghouls from Hell.

She was Steve Luxenberg’s Secret Aunt, and as a result of her family’s rather innocent trust in the proxy authorities to just “deal with it”, a poor, disabled young woman was blithely consigned to the Lowest Circles of the Inferno.

That old post-war fearful mentality - O Tempora! O Mores!

But you know, even WE have our Ghosts.

Their flitting images recur many times in our dreams and nightmares at night.

They are the experiential personas that our psyches throw up from our past into our nighttime self-generated fantasy tales, modern psychologists suggest.

These experts suggest further that these images and their persistence are rooted in the conditioning and past trauma we have been exposed to, day after day, and year after year.

In other words, messages from our conditioning such as excelling in our chosen fields will take form in ‘dream actors’ like on TV - taking their faces from among a few of our friends and family - in plots conforming to that oft-repeated message.

And these ‘Dream Actors’ can be cast by the director, our subconscious dreaming minds, in either an inspiring or unpleasant light - according to our moods and current experiences.

So Annie’s not the only one to have ghosts!

And some of them are DOWNRIGHT MEAN...

When I was two or three, I had a recurring nightmare of a horrid character whom I could only describe to my inquiring parents as The Man with a Hat On.

Now, the image for it was taken by my traumatized self from a Mexican portrait hanging in the hall adjacent to my room of a grinning old man with a sombrero...

But why that particular image?

Well, through introspective investigation I remembered that my Dad spent too-long formative years within the English public school system, whose pet motto seems to have been “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

And thus he, and I, became willing or unwitting byproducts of that conditioning in a concrete sense.

My Dad certainly enacted that conditioning on us young kids!

And the hat? Well, I reasoned with the help of memory that my Dad - like the other neighbourhood dads - sported a fedora in those early 1950’s.

And the hall where the Hatted Man hung grinning... was the dire locale for Dad’s duly meted physical discipline!

So, Eureka...

My dear old Dad was, to my subconscious self, the Man with the Hat On - when he wielded the much-feared retributive ping-pong paddle we so dreaded, to warm up our behinds!
***

Steve, though, a journalist by trade, follows through on a much more exhaustive and exact trail of investigative research to come up with HIS more incredible insights into a family past he had never known before...

Like the grim historical medical legacy we have in common.

A legacy we must not forget as we move on, hopefully, toward a gentler future for this violent world.

One which we all must share - one can only hope and pray - more peaceably, humanely and gently.

[Carol]

The Hook - I rarely use this format for non-fiction but feel an explanation of my path to Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret is in order. In my former position in our public library I was responsible for ordering adult materials. Many, many items caught my eye. I’m certain these two quotes from a Kirkus review were intriguing enough to warrant the purchase. ”In 1995, the author learned that his aging mother had a sister she had never mentioned.”

”Beautifully complex, raw and revealing.”

I purchased Annie’s Ghosts in 2009 for our library and it circulated well but somehow I had never read it. Fast forward to my new found curiosity in family genealogy which has lead to listening to several podcasts with tips for finding out more about my ancestry. Genealogy Gems Book Club chose Annie’s Ghosts
. Lisa Louise Cooke, the host of the podcast interviews Author, Steve Luxenberg in episodes 120 and 121. I have not listened to this interview yet nor the book group discussion on Facebook and Twitter but decided now was time to read the book.

The Line - ”Secrets I’ve discovered have a way of working themselves free of their keepers.“

The Sinker - What struck me first was the cover of the hardbound copy in my hand. The old photo with its misty image of Luxenberg’s Mother and Aunt is enthralling. By books end my mind saw this image as a sort of hologram, producing a fully three-dimensional person. This full imagery of Annie is due to the painstaking persistence and meticulous research Luxenberg undertook to reveal this ghost.

Imagine your surprise picking up the phone to hear your sister’s voice saying ”You’re never going to believe this. Did you now that Mom had a sister?” A sister? How could that be? Luxenberg’s mom was an only child. She always said those words ”I’m an only child.” The initial telling of the secret gives little detail. His mother, taken by a social worker to a medical visit overheard her state that she had a younger sibling; one was disabled and was institutionalized at a young age. At first illness and then a hope that his mother might reveal the secret herself, kept Luxenberg and his sister from asking who this sister was. When his mother died in 1999, the secret remained only to service once more, as secrets do. And now the secret had a name. Annie.

The Dedication
To Mom and Annie, too late to be set free;
to “the 5,000,” who still might be;
and to Mary who, who stands alone”

In his quest to understand Annie’s life and how those around her did not see her, he at last gives her a rightful existence, a history, a face, one never known. Luxenberg finds other family secrets that take him on a journey he could not have imagined. Without judgment or excuses for his mother, he unfolds Annie’s story and allows us, the reader to know this woman too. Annie, no longer a secret, no longer a ghost, is a person I will remember.

Genealogy Gems BookClub: Gems to Read List

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon an advance copy of Annie's Ghosts and picked it up thinking my mom might like to read it. Intrigued by some of the blurbs, somehow I started it and found myself carrying it around in search of free moments to read for the next several days--Mom would have to wait her turn. Obviously, family dynamics and hidden, secret things resonate with everyone. Although time does sweep back and forth, even within chapters, the author has done a great job crafting a narrative that even stands up to interrupted reading. Without giving anything away, I have to say that the resolution of this book, while not what I was expecting, is precisely what feels true. I think the author's honesty and his quest for truth make this a rich book for personal reading, and I would definitely recommend it for book clubs as well. Although I think it will do really well in paperback, I sincerely hope people won't choose to wait that long.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selected as the Great Michigan Read for 2013 and 2014. I read this book over the course of one weekend! I love history especially Michigan history. This book touches on all sorts of subjects from family secrets, Michigan history, mental illness, immigration and discrimination. The book reads like fiction another bonus! A title that is open to all sorts of discussions! Kudos to Detroit native Steve Luxenberg!

[Kricket · Rating 4 out of 5]

i just wrote a ridiculously long review and x'd out of it by accident without saving. it is gone and i am lazy. you will never find out what i really think.

[Jeanette · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wavered between 2 and 3 stars. 2.5 stars but not rounded up. Because of the way it's told, its length and its voice. It would have been so more compelling if the author's deceased mother would have had some emotional or factual input BEFORE the search. In other words, if she had told the story of what she knew or what she had "forgotten". That she did tell everyone and for long decades that she was an only child, and repeatedly! Well, that was how perceptions in those times could be considered/seen as the "best" for all. But in this son's telling from first inquires to last results?

Well, it was long and drawn out and just seems incredibly sad. That type of denying a real family member was common. And not just because of physical or mental conditions either. In adoption and in situations which demanded a perception of "all is well here" and a strong context of wanting normalcy, many families and numerous cultures, societies still "forget" and insist in this kind of path.

It has even happened in my own extended family. My mother-in-law's Mom died 3 days after she was born. It was the second wife his father had lost at 26, just following childbirth. She had 3 other siblings SHE KNEW ABOUT. There was one sister (the first wife's last child) who was nearly 3 when she, my mother-in-law, was born. That 3 year old sibling was adopted out to a much more wealthy family who wanted a child. He couldn't keep all those kids on the fruit truck all day, especially the toddler- so she, the 3 year old, was the pick. While her father's sister, her aunt took my mother-in-law, the newborn, and raised her at her own house until she was old enough to attend grade school. They deemed it was easier for the newborn to acclimate to the aunt's house/life family- which also had 5 kids and- one of those was a 2 month old.

They all went to the same grade AND public high schools in Chicago, on top of it, and she looked nearly a twin to my mother-in-law. But they all denied the blood relationship completely and lead completely separate lives socially- with no connecting names. Until they were all past 55 years old and after 2 of the brothers had passed when they formed a different relationship that was lovely to view from all sides. Close, and without rancor. Despite the vast difference in the economics of their upbringing.

This would be a better non-fiction read for those who don't understand what stigmas were then and how perceptions were for doing the best for the most than it was for me. I couldn't stay embedded.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book this month as part of my 12/12/12 TBR challenge: 12 books in 12 months that have languished for a year or more in my “TBR” (To Be Read) pile. The bullet on this one is that I’m glad the challenge made me finally read it, for a variety of reasons. It’s thought-provoking and educational (in a good way)...definitely worth a read if you’re interested in mid-20th century history, the history of medicine, or investigative journalistic techniques.

I was first drawn to “Annie’s Ghosts” while shopping for my mom’s birthday a few years back because it’s a non-fiction exploration into a piece of family history that’s eerily familiar. Author Steve Luxenberg was an adult when he discovered that his mother -- who had always identified as an only child -- had had a sister.

In a similar revelation, my mother was in college before she discovered that her paternal grandmother hadn’t died when my grandfather was three, as family history had always held.

Luxenberg’s aunt died when he was nine; my great-grandmother died when my mom was eight. My grandfather -- her son -- only learned of her existence presence a year or two earlier, and my mom believes they might have even met once. Both women -- Luxenberg’s aunt, my great-grandmother -- had spent about 40 years, from the mid-1920s to early 60s, in mental institutions within the United States.

Determined to learn about the aunt he never knew, Steve Luxenberg digs into old court and medical files, and pieces together a history of mental illness and treatment in the mid-20th century. The book is not a dry treatise on the history of medicine, though; the tale is of his quest, and he shares every aspect of it with the reader in such a way that you feel like you’re looking over his shoulder, experiencing the excitement of each new discovery along with him.

And it truly is a voyage of discovery. Along the way, Luxenberg uncovers several other family secrets: how his father snuck into the US; how a paternal aunt had escaped the Nazi slaughter at Radziwillow in Ukraine; a brush with mental illness on the other side of the family. The stories are all vivid portraits of American life in a second-generation immigrant family of the mid-century, but more interesting is the way that each time, Luxenberg brings it back to his mother, re-examining the events with a new sense of how her unique perspective and desire to keep the secret must have informed her actions -- sane, sensible, or irrational -- for the rest of her life.

My great-grandmother has always been a figure of mystery to me. Who was she? What did they think plagued her? Did she love her husband? Her children? Did she miss them when she was put away -- or was she even aware enough to notice? I picked up this book for the first time hoping for some sort of insight into these things; of course, I didn’t find it. Luxenberg can only postulate about what his mother’s sister must have felt; his extrapolations are based upon sporadic medical records and their shift over time, combined with interviews with retired doctors from the hospital where she was housed, and a lot of research into the standard of care regarding the mentally ill in the mid-century. One of the most shocking things I discovered was that, by the end of the depression, the hospital where Annie Cohen (Luxenberg’s aunt) lived was so overcrowded that 45 women lived in a ward meant for 18, 140 were in a ward meant for 100, and patients literally were sleeping on the floors. It’s no wonder Annie Cohen -- and Minnie Schuster -- disappeared beneath a crush of humanity. And yet, each of those thousands of patients were people...at the least, someone’s child. But also, sisters, aunts, and mothers. Annie Cohen was buried next to her parents, but thousands of patients are in unmarked graves behind the hospital where she spent her adult life.

At its most basic level, “Annie’s Ghosts” is a plea for visibility and transparency. Pretending that her sister had never existed caused Luxenberg’s mother a large amount of damage; we can only imagine what the isolation and abandonment did for Annie’s already-broad paranoia streak. Today, a family in the same situation would never consider locking a relative away and pretending that they did not exist to such an extent. Time and again, Luxenberg traces stories of his familial tragedies to show the repercussions of secret-keeping. Secrets increase isolation; they don’t allow for healing. Luxenberg’s odyssey to uncover his family’s secrets and bring them to light was an intellectually stimulating, ultimately enjoyable chronicle of his attempts to understand his mother's misguided attempts to put her sister "behind her," and of his own journey towards understanding and accepting the part of his mother that he never knew.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part mystery, part investigative journalism, and part family history, Annie’s Ghosts is about the discovery of family secret. Details of the secret unfolds like a mystery with writing that’s easy to read thanks to Steve Luxenberg’s investigative journalism background.

Steve discovers that his mother, who always made the point of telling everyone she was an only child, had a sister that almost no one knew about. Unfortunately, this secret is only unearthed on his mother’s deathbed. With only a few details to hold onto, that this sister was disabled and lived in a mental institution, Steve starts his search for more information in order to understand why his mother would keep such a secret like this.

Annie’s Ghosts contains not only with Steve’s newly unearthed secret, but also the secrets of other family members weaved into a shared history. The journalist author manages to present the facts while conveying appropriate emotions to family events at the same time.

An underlying theme in the book is the roles Steve has to play as a journalist as well as a son. He does a delicate balancing act between the two, managing to draw the reader in without pulling on too many heartstrings.

The book reads as fiction not only because it’s full of recalled memories, but because some of the events Steve’s family members had to go through were so extraordinary. One aunt’s story is dramatic enough to make a movie out of. It’s hard to believe some of these things happened.

When I first picked up Annie’s Ghosts, I thought it was a book about the Holocaust. While parts of the Holocaust are in there, it’s never the main part of the story — more of a backdrop. In essence, it’s a story about a family and its struggle during the Depression.

[Weavre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Annies' Ghosts is a beautifully told story, and could have been a great book if it had been about 100 pages shorter. Too often, the gripping, personal narrative was inexplicably interrupted by a dry-as-a-textbook history of Detroit. A better editor might have insisted on cutting that material and focusing on the heart of one family's secret.

This story gripped me by the second page, and for a time I thought I'd not be able to put it down ... until I found myself slogging through Detroit's old cigar industry and its immigrant workers, the personal angle lost as the author wandered into a different genre.

Still, the core story is strong enough, and well-enough related, to keep a few stars in my rating. If you don't have any personal objection to history texts--which I admit I sometimes do--then you're likely to love this.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story of a family with a hidden secret that a mother was hiding from her family about a sister that spent the most of her life in an institution. The sister, Annie, lived at home until she was 21 and then spent the rest of her life institutionalized. The mother's children found out about their hidden aunt not long before their mother died but did not ask her about her sister. After his mother's death then Steve the author tried to piece together the story and why his mother hid this from her husband and children. It would have been an easier story to tell if he had just asked his mom before she died. That's what I kept thinking all the way through the book. It was an interesting story about all the hoops he had to jump through to gather information and all the things he found out about his father and mother in the process. I just didn't feel that the story was told in a very compelling way. All I can say is it was okay.

[Amy Huntley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fascinated by this book--and I usually don't enjoy reading non-fiction--let alone feel compelled to turn the pages of it. I wanted to know more about the family circumstances that created a situation where a woman would completely turn her back on her sister. Where she would hide her existence so completely that her own children would be astonished to learn she'd ever existed. But even more compelling was the way Luxenberg brought together an entire society and history (of Michigan and of the American culture, and even of the world including the Holocaust) to show how these various colliding forces impacted the people who interacted with the woman who denied the existence of her sister. Because there were so many mysteries he was unable to ever solve for someone he cared about, he made me care even more about the lost people who never became more than a number in the graveyard of Michigan's large mental health institutions from the mid-20th Century.

[Sarah Weathersby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was immediately intrigued when I read the description of this book. It's part memoir, part mystery, and the other part I'll get to later.

The author, Steve Luxenberg, is an investigative journalist for the Washington Post. Shortly before his mother dies, he learns that his mother, Beth Luxenberg, had a sister. He doesn't quite process this new information until he starts to replay in his head the narrative of his mother's life as an only child. Mom always brought it up that she was an only child as if she had been a member of some exclusive club for only children.

And so begins the mystery to find out about Annie, what happened to her, why she was a secret, and why his mother held onto the secret until she died. Such is the stuff of investigative reporting. So the author took a sabbatical from his job to write this story.

First he discovers that he and his siblings were the only ones who didn't know anything about Annie. There were other relatives in Beth's household while she was growing up who saw disabled Annie in the days before she was committed to a mental institution. And since they are now all quite elderly, Beth's generation or older, their stories had to be ferreted out to answer all the questions Steve had about how and why his mother held onto a lie.

Luxenberg alternates between family history and the history of mental institutions and the history of the stigma associated with mental illness. His investigation takes him to archives of institutions where Annie spent most of her life. Then when he gets into investigating the family members who knew the secret over 70 years ago, where they were and how were they involved in the household, I became overwhelmed with the rabbit trails he was following. As in the case of "uncle" Hyman Cohen whose name showed up on the 1930 census records as living with Beth's parents in Detroit, he digs further to find that Hyman Cohen didn't exist until he arrived at Ellis Island from Russia. The ship's manifest shows him as Chaim Korn.

From that point I skimmed the rest of the book. Too much research to be justified. I would have liked it better if the author had written more about the family relationships, and left out the cigar factory rabbit trail.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m from Detroit and I am a huge fan of genealogy so this book was intriguing to me. Reading this book it brought out thoughts of my childhood and the theme of this book, family secrets. My lower rating only refers to some of the detail I felt could have been left out but ultimately you could see this was a mission of love from a son to his mother.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about 'Annie's Ghost' from an NPR interview with the author, Steve Luxenberg several months ago. I was captivated by the story he told and his articulateness. I came across the book again while reading a review on an ancestry research board. Everyone seemed to find it a worthwhile read so as an avid fan of genealogy, I reserved it at the library and picked it up this week. The book does not disappoint. The author is an investigative journalist who was left with a family mystery when his mother became ill. The medical history she gave a social worker included mention of a sister that scant few realized she had and the ones that did know something of this revelation, knew none of the details. In fact, she not only didn't indicate she had a sister, she went so far as to present herself as an only child. Luxenberg's journey into discovery of his mother's past is fascinating as clue by clue, he pieces together the puzzle. It also verifies what I find in my own research that people prior to recent generations felt great shame for family problems whether it be mental illness, physical deformities, divorce, homosexuality, poverty, or alcoholism. People of prior generations tended to sweep a great deal under the rug and rarely, if ever, engaged in open conversations about issues they felt would cause the family or individuals to be socially stigmatized.

At this point I am only on page 89, however, it's one of those books that whenever I get any spare minute I pick it up and continue the journey. Highly recommend, especially for family researchers. Researchers will certainly 'get' the steps he takes, his thought process and the way each bit of information fleshes out the story of Annie Cohen and the excitement each time he unearths one more piece of the 'big picture.'

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was captivating. Being from the suburbs of Detroit, I was obsessed with Eloise as a kid. My mom used to drive us by the grounds & tell us so many stories about the “crazy people” who lived there. In high school, it was a big dare to go to Eloise at night. The rumors were that it was haunted! (Yeah...I never went)

I was so intrigued to find out about the author’s sister, Annie. However, about halfway through the story he started taking so many sidestreets that I became very disinterested. When he discovered her friend Ann, he almost started writing another book about the Nazis. Mr. Luxenberg just got too detailed about every single person he talked to regarding his lost Aunt & the story turned rather boring.

A quote that I truly believe lies within every family history:

“Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances, and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.”

I get wanting to give Annie’s life meaning and justice, but the story would’ve been much more enjoyable had it been told from the perspective of his mother, Beth.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Annie’s Ghosts, Steve Luxenberg (a Washington Post journalist) tells of discovering the secret his mother kept from him and his siblings—they had an aunt who had been institutionalized at age 21. As Luxenberg searches for answers about his aunt and why his mother elected to change her entire family history, he discovers just how difficult it is to obtain records from a time when mental illness was a secret shame for families. Even after he gets legal documents giving him the authority to act as the representative of Annie’s estate, Luxenberg still has difficulty getting the information he needs. It is also a battle against time as the institutions Annie stayed at have started destroying the records since they are more than 25 years old.

This remarkable tale also delves into the interesting history of the treatment of mental illness in America. It also touches on the Depression era and World War II. Luxenberg’s journalistic skills shine through as he explores all of these subjects with a mix of objectivism and a son’s desire to discover the truth about his family. While it is still only July, I do think this will make my top five for best books of 2009; it might even make number one.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 2 out of 5]

I watched my mom devour this in a weekend so I had high hopes. Steve Luxenberg is a Detroit journalist, who has meticulously documented every step of his personal search for his mother's family secret, namely her handicapped sister Annie. I grew up in Michigan and have Jewish German ancestry, but even that shared background couldn't keep me interested in every single tedious detail presented here. For me either the book was too long, or the reveal didn't live up to all the build up. But if I were related, this would have all been fascinating and I can appreciate this as a son's painstaking labor of love.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary: Annie Cohen is a mystery. An unknown. His mother's sister who had never been mentioned. Join Luxenberg's journey to discover Annie's story.

Why I Read This: I had always wanted to read this, but never had taken the time. Then it became the Great Michigan Read.

Review: I loved this book. It's excellent narrative non-fiction. It doesn't just cover memories of Detroit and its Jewish community, Luxenberg looks at Ukrainian history and the holocaust. Most importantly he tracks down the members of a community to look at attitudes towards the mentally ill, the physically ill, and the intellectually impaired.

[Cynthia Sillitoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, but a bit overwhelming in its detail.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Steve Luxenberg had always thought his mother was an only child, but late in her life he learned that she had had a sister. Why had he and his siblings, and possibly even his father not known about this family member? After his mother’s death, he decided to find out more about his aunt, Annie Cohen, who was born with a disability and who spent the entirety of her adult life in “Eloise”, the huge public hospital for the mentally ill in Detroit. In the course of Luxenberg’s research, he not only found answers to some of his questions about his aunt, but also uncovered stories from his family’s history that he had never known.

This book delves into more than just the author’s family secrets; Luxenburg explores the changes in the treatment of the mentally ill, and also relates his cousin’s harrowing tale of escaping from a doomed village in the Ukraine during the Holocaust. This book was fascinating and difficult to put down. Many thanks to my cousin for checking my GoodReads “Want to Read” list and giving me this book for Christmas.

[Alison Ong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read! Gripping in the beginning but he gets into the weeds with family history in the middle but I learned a lot about immigration during/after the holocaust and the Michigan mental health system. Very interesting to see how much things have changed since way back when and even since this was written! The ending was satisfying enough. Good Michigan read for sure!

[Heather Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the Bridge Michigan book club. Lots of info about Detroit, involuntary hospitalizations back in the 1940’s, stigma of mental illness and the authors journey to learn about his aunt and why she was kept a secret. Not my usual genre but it was very good.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Luxenberg grew up believing his mother, Beth, was an only child. About five years before his mother's death, he learned that she had a sister who was institutionalized when they were both young children. He never spoke to her about it, but when she died in 2000, the family learned that Beth's sister, Annie, died in 1972 at the age of 53. Luxenberg wondered how it was that he and his siblings knew nothing of their aunt and why there was no evidence at all of Annie's existence -- other than the notice from the cemetery about placing flowers on the family graves, which triggered the investigation into his mother's past.

Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret is the story of Luxenberg's mission to learn about Annie's life and why his mother went to such great lengths to conceal her existence. The book details each step on his journey, from the initial questions about whether it was right for him to dig up his mother's secret to a reassessment of his mother's life.

Luxenberg’s more than 30 years as a journalist (he’s currently an associate editor at The Washington Post) shines through in his writing, and he knows just the right questions to ask to get the information he covets. Annie’s story is heartbreaking, but Luxenberg does his best to give her the voice and recognition she didn’t have during her life. I highly recommend this one.

Full review on Diary of an Eccentric

[Lizzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those book length magazine articles, though it kept me reading.
His mother always described herself as an only child, but in her last years her kids discovered she’d had a sister who spent most of her life in a county hospital for the insane. Since this son is an investigative reporter he researched the family secret.
He got his aunt’s medical records and learned she was diagnosed as both retarded and schizophrenic. Professionals he consulted agreed she was certainly low IQ and clearly was paranoid and unstable, though “schizophrenic – undifferentiated” isn’t a category used today.
Other documents led him to a cousin who knew both sisters. He’d never known her because she and his mother had a falling out. This woman survived the Holocaust, the only one in her family, with false papers and worked as a translator for the Nazis. After the war she came to the US and got to know his mother. They fell out because she didn’t approve of how his mother treated the sister.
There are a lot of twists and turns, some more interesting than others. He’s shocked by some things that seem mundane, like his grandparents being first cousins. At the end he tries to tie Annie’s fate to the Holocaust somehow, which didn’t really work.
Despite medical records describing how difficult his aunt was, he sometimes seems ashamed and judgmental of his mother’s choice to keep Annie a secret. As the daughter of someone with two siblings who caused a lot of family grief and who distanced herself from them, I'm not shocked by this story or by the mother’s decision.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Annie's Ghost is a book about secrets. The secret that inspires the novel is Annie, a mentally ill/ disabled Aunt that was hidden from family and friends for most of her life.

As Luxenberg investigates Annie's life and the extent to which her life was hidden, he uncovers multiple secrets from an era when people kept their mouths shut and did not share the most intimate details of their lives - a polar opposite of the Facebook/Twitter revolution.

During this journalistic investigation we learn of the mental health system in Michigan in the post war era and get a glimpse at its slow evolution and the improvements to treatment of both mental and physical disabilities as well as mental illnesses.

We learn of the growing population in Detroit as the Motor City earns its name; and immigrants and southerners move to the city to support the booming industry. I loved hearing about the card games and friendships of this era.

We travel to the Ukraine during the Holocaust and listen to the horrific stories full of bravery and resiliency. During this section I am so grateful that there are organizations videotaping and capturing this history. Luxenberg captures the raw emotion of the storytellers beautifully. Their stories made me raw.

My final thought is of our aging family and friends. if we don't capture their history,who will?

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cover of this book accurately says it is "equal parts memoir, social history, and riveting detective story" and I would add genealogical study as well. After his mother's death, the author learns that Mom had a sister. This is the story of his search, not only for the story of the sister's life, but the story behind why his mother had kept her sister's existence a secret. Along the way he includes well researched information about many topics, including the history of Detroit, the Holocaust in Radziwillow, Ukraine, prosthetic legs, hosptials for the mentally ill, jewish immigration etc. It is a thoroughly reasearched book and handles many difficult subjects with the right mixture of sensitivity and journalistic neutrality. I enjoyed the main story line a lot but found myself scanning over the sometimes lengthy technical descriptions of psychiatic treatment or hospital history etc. However, the book is very well done and is not only a good read, but a great resource for others interested in the many topics it covers.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a detective story, and it’s a mystery, and it’s true. Steve Luxenberg, a journalist, investigates the life of the aunt he never knew or knew of and the secret his mother kept to her dying day.

Luxenberg hears it first from his sister. Now adults, both their parents dead, it seems their mother, Beth, had a sister, Annie, who they had never heard of. And so begin the mysteries: Did Beth really have a sister? Why had she kept this secret? What was Annie’s story?

So he takes time off work at the WASHINGTON POST to investigate. He lays it out in chronological order, and the reader follows as he learns that, yes, Beth did have a sister named Annie who lived in an insane asylum in Detroit for more than 30 years until her death. And they never knew. But who did? Why was Annie left there, and why didn’t Beth want anyone to know?

ANNIE’S GHOSTS is so interesting, even mesmerizing. I’m glad I read it and only wish I had when it was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2009.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the death of their mother, Steve Luxenberg and his siblings were shocked to find out that their mother had a sister. Beth Luxenberg had always mentioned the fact that she was an only child. Very few people knew otherwise. What could have motivated their mother to hide her sister’s existence?

As an editor and journalist for the Washington Post, Steve had conducted investigative reporting before. He decided that he would attempt to find out more about his here-to-fore unknown aunt. What he uncovered was a trail of secrets leading to a Detroit mental hospital where his aunt had spent more than 30 years before her death.

This is a sad story about family secrets, and also about the ways in which the mentally and physically handicapped were perceived and treated until the later years of the twentieth century.

[Cupcakes & Machetes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non-fiction is not my favorite genre but this book went to the top of my favorite non-fiction list. Admittedly, it is a small list but the fact that it goes to the top should not be ignored.

I think one of the reasons that this book worked so well was the detective work that was required to unearth a family secret. In doing so, there was a combination of drama, research, historical facts and first hand personal accounts.

I am a bit of a history nerd and learning more about the history of asylums was both fascinating and informative and really did provide a better backdrop as to why someone would go to such lengths to keep a disabled family member hidden. Explaining the origins of psychiatry in its infancy added another layer to the complexity of the story.

In short:
Immigration + holocaust survivor accounts + asylums + psychiatry + hidden family members = one hell of a read.

[SundayAtDusk · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Steve Luxenberg took a year off from his job as a newspaper editor to investigate and write this book, it appears he left his editor's eye and skills back in the newsroom. For the first 80 or so pages of Annie's Ghost, I literally became dizzy at times reading it. Not only did the author apparently include every question in his head about "if mom had a sister", he also included every thought in his head about the matter. This is not good in a book. A book like that quickly starts sounding more like therapy than a story; the author starts seeming more like a man with a bad obsession, than a man trying to discover the truth. At one point, I thought if I read the phrase "if mom had a sister" one more time, I would take a bat to this book!

After around page 80, though, the book settles down a bit. This is also when, talking to a therapist, Mr. Luxenberg reveals some of his true motives for writing the book--he feels guilty about being irritated at his elderly mother for becoming needy and clingy, as she aged; he feels guilty about leaving her in a psychiatric hospital for two weeks, when she begged him to get her out. Guilt plays a major role in this book. I could not figure out at times, though, if the author was trying to make his mother out to be guilty or not. He obviously wanted to alleviate his own guilt feeling about her . . . and he strangely did so by making the memory of his long forgotten aunt the reason for almost everything his mother did and said, since the day his aunt was put away in a mental institution in the 1940's.

That was the truly bizarre thing about the book--the constant questioning that every thought or action by his mother was somehow related to his aunt's commitment at Eloise. It was like he could not possibly entertain the idea that his mother simply pushed the memory of her handicapped sister into the background; that she rarely, if ever, thought about her; that actually, little or nothing she said or did had anything whatsoever to do with her sister. Her reaction to being placed in a psychiatric ward for two weeks was probably very, very typical of a woman of her age and background, or of almost any woman finding herself in that situation. Yet, Mr. Luxenberg creates the idea that she must have acted as she did because she remembered how her sister had been committed. Maybe she did. But maybe she didn't. Maybe her whole adult life did not revolve around her sister's memory, as possibly her childhood itself did revolve around her sister's life.

In many families with a handicapped child, the entire family revolves around the child. This can be very detrimental to siblings. When they grow up, they want to get far away from the situation and the memories of it. This sounds more like what happened with Beth, the author's mother. The author, however, apparently really does not want this to be the case. He wants to make his aunt, Annie, with this book, the center of his mother's adult universe. It is too bad she was not in good health when the author found out she had a sister, so he could ask her about it, and hear what she really thought and felt. It is too bad; not to mention, totally unethical; that her final written message to her children was "rewritten" in this book by her son, to show that every comment she made to her children was actually based on her "guilt" about her sister.

Mr. Luxenberg did not grow up with a handicapped sibling; he did not grow up in dire poverty; he appears to not even be very close to his extended family, including his father's siblings. Yet, he writes about his forgotten aunt like he is her savior; he is bringing her life and story to the light; he will not let her be forgotten. Commendable. But how much of it is based on true family love and the need for justice, or just sentimentality and the need to alleviate his own feelings of guilt? It is so easy to be everything to someone who is no longer around to need anything, like time and attention and love and care. Since the author states himself he did not like being around his own mother as she got emotionally needier in her old age, it would probably be a fair guess to assume he, as a child or an adult, would not have wanted to spend much time with a mentally and physically disabled aunt.

Read the book for its exceptional descriptions of Eloise, early immigration, Detroit in the '20's-'70's, Anna Schlajn and the town of Radziwillow during WWII, and many other things. But don't expect all these interesting stories to solve some great "shocking" mystery about the author's family. There is no great mystery. There is nothing shocking. There is only a family secret. The reader learns that secret in the very beginning of the book, and that is what the reader has at the end of the book. Mr. Luxenberg's aunt, Annie, was born with physical and mental disabilities, and was institutionalized in 1940, because she started showing signs of severe mental problems.

The only great mystery about this book is why the author spent so much time guessing and fantasizing about what his mother was thinking about her sister since 1940. He should have spent no more than a few pages doing that, not a whole book. His mother took her thoughts and feelings about Annie with her to her grave. What right does anyone, including her son, have fantasizing; in a published book, no less; what her thoughts and feelings actually were about her sister? One can only guess . . . and the author, unlike his mother, is alive to dispute this, if he wishes . . . the more guilty his mother is about everything, the less guilty he has to feel about anything. Guilt appears to be one of the main reasons this book was written; and yet, ironically, guilt is one of the main reasons this book is no where near as good as it could have been.

(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)