What I Just Read

Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg.

Although I took a ton of books with me on vacation, mostly stuff I don't ordinarily read (i.e., fluffy romances, recommended by helpful friends who thought I needed to "lighten up"), I wound up becoming engrossed in Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg

Luxenberg's aunt, Annie, was institutionalised at the notorious Eloise Asylum in Michigan for over thirty years. Although other family members knew about Annie, Luxenberg's mother Beth never mentioned her or revealed that fact to her children. After Annie died, Beth had her buried, with a service by a rabbi, and placed flowers on her grave regularly for years without ever saying a word.

Not long before she died, an offhand remark by Beth Luxenberg to a social worker --that she had had a younger sister who had been institutionalized when Beth was four years old and the sister two -- opened the door to years of dogged research by Luxenberg, taking him back to his family's origins in Russia, the Holocaust, and interviews with many family members and friends.

His book also shines a light on the treatment of mental illness in the first half of the century, and the thousands of souls lost and forgotten in institutions like Eloise.

The question Luxenberg tries to answer is why this deep secrecy for so many years? While not able to answer that question definitively -- after all, the only person who could had died -- it is a riveting account of a family's history, the frustrations of trying to track down long forgotten information, and the attitudes toward the mentally ill. I think we're able to get a good feel for why such a situation might be covered up during that time period, and how a secret, once created, can loom so ominously in one's lifes that it becomes impossible to let it go.

For more information, go to Luxenberg's web site.