The Conical Glass: Secrets and lies

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Secrets and lies

Are you keeping a family secret? I learned a really good one a couple of years ago, which has the added advantage of being about relatives who are all dead, so I can pass it along without having to worry about invading anyone's privacy. My great-grandmother -- my father's maternal grandmother -- had a "hidden" sister named Emma. Emma gave birth to an illegitimate son in 1916, and both mother and child were considered mentally ill. The son, Birger, spent his life in and out of an asylum before dying in the mid-1970s; Emma was a social outcast who never left her small town, even as most of her siblings emigrated to the U.S. She died a couple of years before her son passed away.

This is how far my great-grandmother went to keep the secret: she always claimed that the church where the genealogical records were kept in her hometown of Stockaryd, Sweden, had burned to the ground, just so no one would ever go searching there for the family history. I assume she never even told my grandmother, her daughter, about Emma. My parents learned about it during an e-mail exchange with some distant relatives after my grandmother's death. Sometimes I think about her and how dreadful it must have been to be shunned by your family, your very existence erased by your own siblings.

When I heard an interview on NPR with Steve Luxenberg about his book Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret, I knew I had to read the book. Luxenberg, a Washington Post editor, learned after his mother's death that the oft-recited narrative of her childhood was a complete fiction. Only child Beth had actually been Bertha, who grew up with her younger sister Annie, a mentally retarded, disabled girl who had been institutionalized at the age of 21. Annie Cohen died in the early 1970s after spending over 30 years in Eloise, a massive public hospital in Detroit. Luxenberg knew that he had to bring all of his reporter's skills to find the truth about Annie -- and why his mother had spent a lifetime keeping her a secret. One of his big questions: did his father, who died several years before his mother, ever find out that he had a sister-in-law?

The book is absolutely fascinating and I highly recommend it, so I don't want to give away too much of what Luxenberg's research reveals. He is fortunate in that some of the people who knew his mother and Annie as children were still alive, so he could track them down and interview them. But the book is about much more than one family's secret -- it's a fascinating portrait of how society's views of mental illness and physical limitations have changed over the decades. Eloise itself, once home to over 10,000 residents and 75 buildings, is now a virtual ghost town with just a handful of dilapidated buildings. Had Annie been born in the early 1970s, instead of dying then, her life would have taken a very different course.

For some reason, the saddest thing to me was that Luxenberg never found a photograph of Annie, despite combing through hundreds of albums belonging to family members, friends and former neighbors. (His mother, not surprisingly, kept no pictures from her childhood; it was as though her life began when she got married in her mid-20s. Beth/Bertha did not even appear in her high school yearbook, perhaps due to the family's poverty.) The haunting cover image is an illustration made from a stock photo. At least Annie's memory is honored by this book.

posted by 125records @ 12:24 PM

1 Comments:

At 10:48 AM, GlitterPoodle said…

Most fun is finding out about family secrets that involve yourself. My mother shared one a couple of years ago about where I came from - it was like watching a slot machine when all the bars line up - suddenly things made sense (tho not money).