Review: Annie's Ghosts
Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, frequent Read Street poster Mary McCauley will take a look at Steve Luxenberg and his new book, Annie’s Ghosts. In a profile, she describes his "struggle to reconcile the competing parts of himself, to pay his familial duty to his mother while remaining true to the values of his [journalism] profession." In this review, she takes a look at the book itself:
Annie’s Ghosts is an exhaustively researched, often moving testimony to the ties that bind families together — including connections we aren’t even aware existed. The author, Steve Luxenberg, is an associate editor at The Washington Post who has supervised two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. He brought more than three decades of investigative reporting experience to his quest for information about the crippled and institutionalized aunt he’d never met.
Annie Cohen was born with a leg that was bent and couldn’t be straightened out, and when she was a teenager, the limb was amputated. She appears to have been developmentally disabled, with an IQ that fluctuated between 56 and 73. As she grew older, she might also have become mentally ill; one issue the book raises is the precise nature of Annie’s impairment, when it developed and whether it worsened during her decades of confinement.
In 1940, Annie was sent to a Michigan psychiatric hospital one day shy of her 21st birthday. She remained institutionalized until her death in 1972 at age 53.
But the book is only partly an attempt to reconstruct Annie’s life and examine the social forces that shaped it. Luxenberg also explores why the author’s mother, a kind and charitable woman, engaged in a lifelong attempt to hide her sister’s existence. In the end, there was much that the journalist didn’t learn about his aunt — for instance, he never was able to turn up a photograph of Annie, if indeed, one existed. Readers with a yearning for the feeling of closure provided by fiction are likely to be frustrated by Annie’s Ghosts.
Though Luxenberg began working on the manuscript full time in March 2006, and though he employed every investigative skill in his considerable arsenal, he was stymied by bureaucratic rules pertaining to patient confidentiality, even after he became the legal representative of his mother’s (and therefore his aunt’s) estate. Indeed, the author’s description of the various hoops he had to jump through to get the smallest shred of information about his aunt is reminiscent of the Circumlocution Office invented by Charles Dickens in his great novel, Little Dorrit.
There’s just one small exception to the author’s determination to do nothing for show. Chapters end on minor “cliffhangers,” presumably to inspire his audience to keep reading. Most writers use an identical technique, but the facts that Luxenberg relates don’t always support even these minor dramatics. Besides, Annie’s story is sufficiently compelling to keep most of us turning the page.
This book’s great strength is its candor but, at times, I wished the author had gone even further and probed more deeply into his own motivations for pursuing his aunt’s story. Luxenberg asks himself all the right questions — why did he knowingly allow a false statement to be published as part of his mother’s obituary? Why didn’t he and his brothers and sisters confront their mother about her lifelong lie? The answers that he provides are persuasive as far as they go, but I sensed that there were other pieces to the puzzle that have yet to be unearthed.
And yet, Annie’s Ghosts exudes honesty. The narrative shifts back and forth between explanatory journalism and personal reminiscences, and some readers may find the resulting shifts in tone to be jarring. But those readers more interested in the journey than in its ultimate destination are likely to be intrigued by the author’s itinerary.
Perhaps Luxenberg’s most intriguing side trip is his visits to his mother’s cousin, Anna Oliwek. The decisions made by both two women (Oliwek and the author’s mother, Beth Luxenberg) provide fascinating parallels. Though Jewish, the teenage Oliwek survived the Holocaust by posing as an ethnic German of mixed blood and by working as a translator for the Nazis. After the war, Oliwek came to the U.S. and got to know her cousins. When Beth Luxenberg later pretended to be an only child — a decision that the author speculates was made out of desperation — Oliwek made no bones of her disapproval.
It appears that to survive, both women felt they had to live a lie.
