Steve Luxenberg - Official Website

As promised: My essay on the evolution of a cross-cultural holiday tradition, which appeared today on The Washington Post website.

By Steve Luxenberg
The Washington Post

I can't shed any light on whether it snowed for six days and six nights when writer Dylan Thomas was twelve, or twelve days and twelve nights when he was six, but I can say that we have read aloud his 1954 "A Child's Christmas in Wales" on ten Christmases since I was thirty, and six times in the past six years--and on Christmas Day 2009, we will gather to read it aloud once again.

This tradition--those numbers qualify as a tradition by now, I think--doesn't begin with me or my family. For much of my younger life, as well as my wife's, the hours of December 25 passed quietly, without presents or trees or ornaments or mistletoe or fanfare of any sort, unless one of the eight days of Hanukkah happened to fall on Christmas Day.

Some of my Christian friends found it hard to believe that I didn't feel left out. Isn't it hard, they asked, to have nothing to do on Christmas with all this merriment taking place around you?

In a word: No. The glow of Hanukkah candles burns bright in my seasonal memory, but the appearance of outdoor Christmas lights in my neighborhood merely reminds me that fall has arrived, dotting the autumn air with red and green and white, often before the leaves have begun their annual gold-and-orange ritual. I enjoy the traditions of Christmas, but they are not my traditions, and they have never held any special meaning for me.

Dylan Thomas's winter wonderland changed that. My wife, our two children (now 23 and 25) and I have become part of another family's Christmas tradition, the tradition of our good friends Scott and Francie. They no longer remember exactly what prompted them, on Christmas Day 1976, the first Christmas of their married life, to read aloud the story of Mrs. Prothero and her fire, of the Useful and Useless Presents, of the Uncles who "put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept," and of "the few small aunts," aunties Dosie, Bessie and especially Hannah, "who laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year."

But now, once a year, wherever Scott and Francie may be, home or away, the slim volume comes out for a re-reading. A once-blank page in the book lists the year, place and names of those in attendance. The book has marked Christmases in Baltimore and Moscow, in New England and Merry Old England. Scott and Francie had no children when they started this tradition; now their three children, ranging in age from 19 to 26, have never known a Christmas without a visit to that mystical, almost mythical snow-bound land near the edge of "the carol-singing sea."

If you asked me on a sun-washed day in July, I couldn't tell you which passages I had read aloud the previous December or why I smile every time at the image of "the Uncles breathing like dolphins." But I can tell you why this quiet, quirky, very Welsh narrative has become a part of my family of four's holiday season: It reminds us of being invited to join in another family's special day, of friendship and warmth, of a holiday tradition with a special meaning all its own.

Sometime after dinner on Christmas Day, we will gather by the snap-crackle-pop of the fire in our friends' living room, all nine of us if we're lucky, and we will take turns, listening and laughing as Thomas's story unfolds once again. Then we will say good night, go out in the chill darkness for the ride home, and we will sleep.

Steve Luxenberg, a Washington Post associate editor, is the author of Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Christmas, Hanukkah, holidays, Jewish, Steve Luxenberg

I went into this blog with my eyes open and my fingers ready. I vowed (to myself, not in print) that I would avoid the most obvious pitfall of blogging, that I would not let the blog lapse into silence, that I would find something meaningful to say, something that would allow me to post every few weeks.

My last posting? July 19.

Enough said.

Apart from sloth, I do have another excuse. For much of the past five months, I've been on a kind of perpetual book tour for Annie's Ghosts, and blogging about promotion feels too, well, too self-promotional. The prospect of talking about my book, and then going to the keyboard to write about talking about my book, made me self-conscious, I now realize.

That means I missed some opportunities to write about some of the wonderful people I have met in Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Baltimore, on the radio and online, where I have received some truly remarkable e-mails from readers in reaction to the book.

I'm particularly fond of the woman who pulled me aside after one of my talks to say: "I was talking about your book at a family gathering, and it led to a conversation about some family secrets that we had always avoided discussing. Thanks for making it safe for us to talk about things that we needed to bring out."

As 2009 comes to a close with family gatherings all around the country, her comment has a particular resonance. Whatever your holiday tradition, whatever your religious tradition, wherever you celebrate those traditions this year, whether close to home or far away, I'm betting that family will be a part of your thoughts if not your celebration.

Later today, I'll post a essay I wrote about my family's holiday tradition, posted today on my newspaper's website, The Washington Post. (It first appeared a week ago as part of an "author holiday blog" at bookreporter.com, a website that reviews books and publishes interviews with authors.)

For Annie's Ghosts, this has been quite a year. The book has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and the Diane Rehm Show, and in Parade Magazine. It landed on the Independent Booksellers Association’s Fall/Winter list of recommendations for reading groups, one of only three nonfiction books to make the cut. Then, earlier this month, it won two prestigious honors: The Library of Michigan chose it as a Michigan Notable Book for 2010, and it was selected for The Washington Post's Best Books of 2009 list.

Back soon with a posting of my holiday essay, which The Post titled "A Jewish Christmas story."

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, families, family secrets, honors, NPR, Steve Luxenberg, The Washington Post

Promoting a book can be hard work, but it has many rewards, including the possibility of the unexpected, surprising encounter, such as this one that comes out flying at me out of my past:

The scene: The Birmingham Community House outside Detroit, my native city and the locale for much of the narrative in Annie’s Ghosts. It’s a Tuesday night in early July, and there’s an overflow crowd of nearly 200 who have come to hear a talk about the book.

A few minutes before the program is set to begin, the sponsoring organizations direct me to the signing table for a photo session. The organizers ask a few people to come over to have their books signed. A line forms. After the photo, I keep signing, thinking that with a crowd of that size, it would be good to reduce the number of people who will have to wait in line after the talk – a plus for everyone.

Two women approach. Their faces have an expectant look, as if I might recognize them. But I don’t. I’ve long since gotten over being embarrassed by a situation like this. A mumbled apology just makes the moment more awkward.

One of the women sees that I’m clueless about her identity, and she decides to offer a clue. She pulls open the jacket that she’s wearing, revealing the lining. Stitched there, in bright gold yarn, is my name. I stare, befuddled, at “Steve Luxenberg.” In the momentary silence that follows, I’m thinking: Did she stitch it herself? She doesn’t look like a groupie. Did she buy it at a flea market, see the newspaper article that mentioned my talk, and decide to come? No, that’s too weird.

Finally, she takes me off the hook. The story, of course, is much simpler. She’s my former next door neighbor. When she was 10, and I was 14, I babysat for her and her brothers. Her name is Shellee, and we haven’t seen each other in about, oh, 35 years. She had come with her mom, Joann, who still lives in the house next the one that my parents once owned.

The jacket? It’s my high school “letter” jacket, the one that athletes wear to show off that they belonged to one of the varsity teams. My sport was basketball. When Shellee got to the same high school, she earned a varsity letter, too.

Now I have to let Shellee narrate the rest of the story, and how she came to have my jacket, because I have no memory of what she is telling the small knot of listeners now gathering around her at the signing table.

She explains that in those days (the early 1970s) letter jackets were the exclusive province of the boys’ athletic teams. Girls could have letter sweaters, just like the guys, but not jackets. That made her mad, and when I was home from college at some point, she complained to me about the unfairness of it all. She says that I retrieved my letter jacket, and brought it to her. Here, I said (according to Shellee), take it and wear it.

She did just that, proudly.

I examine the jacket now. It shows a few signs of its age – fraying cuffs, tattered collar, a few tears in the lining – but it’s in good enough shape to be the centerpiece of a brief and emotional reunion of old neighbors.

Someone standing close by, hearing Shellee tell the story, suggests that she return the jacket to me.

“Do you still wear it?” I ask.

“I throw it on occasionally,” she says.

“You keep it,” I say. “It’s yours. It’s hasn’t been mine for a long time.”

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, book talks, Steve Luxenberg

Frequently, in my talks about Annie’s Ghosts over the last six weeks, the conversation winds its way around to this question: Can families obtain the records of relatives who spent time in state or county hospitals?

The answer: Maybe, but it won’t be easy.

For decades, states have withheld certain government records, particularly medical records, from public scrutiny. States also have policies about how long it must retain its records, and how to dispose of them. While every state and the federal government maintains historical records, often at special archives, most publicly-generated records are not preserved.

The National Archives, for example, saves only about fraction of the millions of pages of new federal records created annually. The Archives judges only three percent of all government documents to be historically significant enough to preserve.

Journalists and historians, of course, would love to see them all. We don’t have to pay for their upkeep or the mountain of hours that would be required to sift and catalog them, and make an index or finders’ guide to make the information more useful. On the other hand, digital technology changes the rules of the game, allowing governments to store much more data in much less space. Searchable databases would reduce (but not eliminate) the cataloguing process.

Those are the logistical challenges, which are tough enough. The philosophical challenge is even harder. To be blunt, there’s a silent war going on between privacy and history, and privacy is winning. Recent changes in federal and state laws has exalted privacy at the expense of history. HIPAA, the reigning federal law, has conferred privacy rights on the dead, allowing medical records to remain under wraps permanently.

In the case of a celebrity, some form of privacy might make some sense in the short term (imagine the mad rush for medical records every time a Michael Jackson died). But keeping patient records closed forever (or destroying them after 20 years) only serves to guarantee that historians can’t write a meaningful history of some of our public institutions.

In researching Annie’s Ghosts, I was told that records of my aunt’s 31 years in two of Michigan’s public psychiatric institutions no longer existed. They were destroyed, a state official told me, because they were older than 20 years, the limit under the state’s “record retention” policy.

The rise of digital technology will lead governments to re-evaluate the necessity of destroying all those paper records. That will put the focus on who should have access to sensitive records, and when.

Census records are opened to the public 72 years after they are collected. Robert Gellman, an expert on privacy law who helped craft legislation on Capitol Hill for two decade, told me that privacy rights and the historical record could both be served by some sort of time limit for the opening of medical records, although he would favor something far shorter than 72 years.

Most people would claim to be in favor of both privacy and history. That’s the problem. “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong,” Hegel, the German philosopher, once observed. “They are conflicts between two rights.”

Exalting privacy has come at the expense of history. That’s one tragedy, to use Hegel’s word, that we can prevent.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, family history, medical records, mental health, privacy, Steve Luxenberg

Memo to New York City readers of Annie's Ghosts (and anyone from nearby towns in New Jersey and Connecticut who is interested in the book and its author):

This Tuesday, June 2, at 6:30 p.m., I'll be speaking at the Lower East Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard Street in Manhattan. Okay, if that isn't enough by itself to get you on the subway and down to the Essex Street-Delancey Street station (the nearest one to the museum), here's why this particular author event is special: Two authors for the price of one, and the admission price is ... free. (Both our books will be available for purchase and signing, and need I say that Father's Day is right around the bend. But the talk/conversation is absolutely free.)

I probably wouldn't write a blog about this event if I were appearing alone, but I have no hesitation about plugging the other writer. Erin Einhorn's book, The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home, came out last year in hardcover, and last month (April) in paperback. We don't know each other, but our biographies suggest that we should: both Detroit natives, both journalists (Erin's a reporter for the New York Daily News), both with mothers who were secret keepers.

Erin's journey into her family history took her to Poland in search of the family that sheltered her infant mother from the Nazis. Erin went looking for the past, and unexpectedly found herself in the middle of a very present-day dispute,. "Six decades after two families were brought together by history," the book synopsis says, "Einhorn overcomes seemingly insurmountable barriers — legal, financial, and emotional — only to question her own motives and wonder how far she should go to right the wrongs of the past."

I've read Erin's book, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about her journey, and how it compares to my search to understand my mom's motivations for hiding the existence of her disabled sister. My quest also took me to places I didn't expect.

Please join us for what I believe will be an engaging discussion of the risks and rewards of exploring family history.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Erin Einhorn, family history, family secrets, journalism, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, memoirs, The Pages in Between

Every author event has the potential for a conversation like this one, which I had the other day at an appearance in Washington:

A woman told me that when her husband had a "nervous breakdown" in the 1970s, she didn't tell anyone. He recovered, and then last year, had a second episode. This time, she said, she told everyone. "I needed the support from my friends," she explained. "The first time, I went through it alone. I wasn't going to do that again."

Nor did she think that silence was necessary. The attitude toward mental illness had changed dramatically in those 30 years, she felt. She was right: Her friends gathered around her, sustained her, helped her.

Secrecy (and its benign cousin, privacy) has its benefits. Families, as I write in Annie's Ghosts, need not live their lives as open books for anyone to read. But when a secret causes pain, for yourself or others, then it's time to think about whether to let it go. I wish my mom had been able to let go of hers. I don't think she intended to keep it for her entire life, and I'm certain it caused her considerable pain (and guilt).

Since my last blog (more than two weeks ago!), the book has garnered a good deal of attention, and much praise from reviewers, both in print and online. I'll probably never get comfortable with the self-promotional part of book writing, so I'll just mention a few here (a full list will appear soon at the part of the website reserved for self-promotion, the Press page, under About the Book).

Barry Werth, in a Washington Post review, called Annie's Ghosts "a poignant investigative exercise, full of empathy and sorrowful truth.”

Elaine Margolin, reviewing in the Jerusalem Post, wrote that "Luxenberg dons many hats in this masterful piece of work; he is simultaneously a historian on Jewish immigration, a Holocaust researcher, an investigative reporter, a memoirist and always a grieving son.”" (I'm not sure I can adopt the "always a grieving son" part, but I'm open to "masterful.")

Kyle Norris, of Michigan Public Radio, took me on a walking tour of the places that I visited in Detroit while researching Annie's Ghosts. Her piece, which ran four minutes, bores in on the personal side of the story, and the tenuous balance I tried to maintain as both a son and a journalist. (Speaking of balance: It is possible, I learned, to walk and talk in a microphone at the same time, without tripping. Well, maybe an occasional stumble, primarily in the talking department.)

One online reviewer, C Wahlman, wrote at amazon.com: "The simple task of finding Annie turns into a debate about secrecy, morality, privacy, the wishes of the deceased, and the obligations of the living."

I wish I had written that.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, family secrets, reviews, secrecy

As I watched the computer screen at WPYR-FM in Baltimore, the calls began stacking up.

"A sister no one talked about."

"A half-brother I never knew existed."

"An uncle airbrushed out of family photos."

During an interview yesterday about Annie's Ghosts on "Midday," Dan Rodricks's public affairs show, listeners jammed the phone lines to talk about the secrets in their own families. We only had time for three calls, unfortunately. Each story was compelling, and each secret was different. Some involved institutionalized relatives, like my aunt Annie, while others involved some other taboo or shame of the generation when the secret was born -- the uncle was gay, the half-brother was from a now-secret previous marriage.

Telling my family's story, and explaining the cultural forces that swirled around my mom as she decided to turn her institutionalized sister into a secret, clearly had resonated with Dan's listeners. It was quite an experience to sit in the studio, earphones on, and hear their stories.

It was also quite an experience to hear this review by Susan McCallum-Smith, which was broadcast Monday on WYPR.

No matter how other reviews turn out, I'll always have this one.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Dan Rodricks, family secrets, radio interview, review, Susan McCallum-Smith, WYPR

At last night’s discussion/reading/signing at the Red Canoe Book Store and Café in Baltimore, I asked those in the crowd with a family secret of their own to raise a hand. That brought forth hands from about half the audience. Someone else stole my punch line: “You just don’t know it yet.”

From the crowd, knowing laughs.

Afterward, several people murmured to me as I signed their books, “I’ve love to tell you about my family secret.” Talking about my family’s secrets often seems to free others to talk about theirs.

That wouldn’t have happened as readily, or at all, a generation or more ago. In response to a question last night about how my mother managed to keep her friends from finding out about her institutionalized sister Annie, I recounted a scene from the book that involved my mom’s bridge game in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Every week, for more than a decade, the same four women got together to play cards. They smoked cigarettes and swapped stories, but they didn’t talk about Mom’s secret. Later, I learned that all three eventually came to know about Annie, but that Mom never realized it.

One of the bridge players, a woman named Ann, had two relatives with disabilities. She was upset and angry, she told me recently, that my mom had chosen to hide Annie’s existence. But Ann never said anything to Mom.

I asked her why. “It wasn’t my place,” she said. “It wasn’t my secret.”

Instead, the bridge players kept their silence, compelled—by custom, by culture, by circumstance—not to say anything to each other.

Something to think about on this Mother’s Day 2009.

P.S. It felt so good to do my first bookstore signing at the Red Canoe. Not only do authors and readers need to support the independents in this time of consolidation and change in the publishing industry, but it’s within walking distance of my house. How cool is that?

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, family secrets, Red Canoe Book Store and Cafe, Steve Luxenberg

This week, as I began touring and talking about Annie’s Ghosts, I’ve been fascinated to hear how readers react to the book.

One book seller told me the other day, "It’s a love story. . . I don’t mean in the usual sense. I mean that there’s so much love in your family, along with all those secrets." Another wrote to me: "Every family has a secret. If someone says they don't, it's because they just don't know the secret."

On Tuesday, when Robert Siegel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed me for an eight-minute segment that aired that night, he seized on the universal nature of the story. (Listen to the interview.) Siegel asked me to read a passage from the book that he thought particuarly underscored that notion. It was too long for the segment that aired, but I thought readers of this blog might like to see what had captured Siegel’s attention.

Here's the passage, from pages 47-48 of Annie's Ghosts:

Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”

There’s no shortage of heirlooms in this attic: Hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: A man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.

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.

Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that drives many of us to embrace silence or deception. But too often, I think, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.

Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?

Siegel said on the air that the book had "different levels of discovery." As I continue my conversations with readers at my coming events, I’m betting that their reactions to Annie’s Ghosts will reveal new levels that I hadn't discovered.

Labels: All Things Considered, Annie's Ghosts, family secrets, Steve Luxenberg

This recent news story from The Washington Post offers a delightful example of the difficulty of reconstructing past events, the topic of my previous posting.

A brief summary for those who don't want to click on the "news story" link above: In 1861, Jonathan Dillon was a watchmaker at a shop near the White House. He was repairing President Lincoln's pocket watch on the day of the attack on Fort Sumter. Four decades later, he told a New York Times reporter that he had etched the following on the watch's inside surface: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

His story remained unconfirmed until March 10, 2009, when experts at the Smithsonian opened the watch and discovered a significantly different commentary: "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date thank God we have a government."

The essence of Dillon's story was true. He had etched a pro-Union message into the watch. But he hadn't mentioned slavery and he hadn't praised Lincoln. Did he intentionally inflate the content of his message?

I don't know, of course, but I would argue: No, not intentionally. Based on my recent experience in researching Annie's Ghosts, I'm betting that Dillon was certain that he had written those loftier words. Over the course of 40 years, as Lincoln's reputation grew and the Civil War had become identified as the war that ended slavery, Dillon's memory of his words incorporated those ideas. Essentially, I'm suggesting, he remembered his message in light of everything that had happened in his lifetime.

There's a comparable moment in Annie's Ghosts. I'm interviewing a cousin about her argument with my mother over the secret that stands at the center of the book. Just as my cousin is recounting a climatic moment in this 50-year-old argument, we're interrupted by the waitress's offer of coffee. After the waitress leaves, my cousin resumes her account—and offers a different (and more dramatic) version of the key moment she had described only seconds before.

As in the case of the watchmaker, the crux of her story was true. I knew, after all, that my mom had kept the secret and that something had caused the two of them to have a falling out. But was either version an "accurate" account of their conversation? Not likely. Rather, my cousin was giving me the version that reflected years of thinking about that moment, a version that reflected her feelings as much as her memory.

"The nuances lie beyond my reach," I wrote in Annie's Ghosts. "Fifty years later, this is the best my cousin can do."

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Lincoln, memoirs, Steve Luxenberg

I suspect the world can survive without another blog, but perhaps there's room for one more place to discuss writing, reporting, books and the issues that interest the readers of books.

As the author of Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret, a new nonfiction book that is part memoir and part history, I was drawn to the following question when it came up in a recent online discussion: How far should memoir writers go in reconstructing scenes and dialogue?

The answer might seem obvious, but I suspect it confounds most writers who don't want to just pretend that we all have infallible memories. Some writers have gone beyond reconstructed dialogue, arguing that invention (based on memory, of course) is legitimate—because truth, in a sense, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.

I draw a harder line than most. I favor the rough edges of memory over neat and pretty reconstructions. (More interesting, usually.) Invention? As I wrote in the online discussion, that's why we have novels.

Readers, I think, are smart. They know that most writers don't have notes or documents to back up dialogue from long ago. So what's the problem? In a word: Credibility. As a writer, I want readers to grant me some license to tell my story. But if I present lengthy dialogue as fact, I risk losing their trust—and their interest. Bad deal for me.

I'll be back here every few days over the coming months to write new posts. Please feel free to share your thoughts here, or at the Family Secrets Forum (where you can discuss the power of family secrets), or by sending me an e-mail through the Contacts page. I'll be reading your comments, in whatever form that appear.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, memoirs, nonfiction, Steve Luxenberg