Of course, as a charter member of Beth’s camp, I didn’t get to hear Esther’s side of the story, except I knew that she had one. I might say there was no love lost between the two women, but that’s not possible because nothing resembling love existed in the first place. Yet they remained yoked together throughout their lives, bound by a cord that encircled them and their daughters. Mom never really accepted Sash’s view that she had two mothers; as far as Mom was concerned, Esther had forfeited her maternal ID card when she left the girls with their grandmother.
Sash walked the tightrope between them, somehow managing not to fall. Her balancing act meant, however, that she saw the best and worst of both women, and she feels certain that Esther must not have known about Annie. Given the tension between the two women, Sash says, Esther would have felt no obligation to keep Beth’s secret. “If my mom knew,” Sash says, “she wouldn’t have held back.”
Before I leave Sash’s house, I retrieve a box containing about half of the six hundred letters exchanged by Mom and Dad during the war. Sash tried to read them a few years ago, but gave up because they reek of cigarette smoke and mold. At some point, I plan to brave the mustiness and read through them all.
If I had to bet on what I’ll find, I’d put a lot of money on negative space—at least when it comes to Annie.
The woman who answers the phone somewhere in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula says that Fran isn’t available right now. When I identify myself as Beth Luxenberg’s son, her pretense fades without apology. I explain that I’m doing some research on my family, and that my questions might seem mysterious at first, but if she could bear with my roundabout approach, all would become clear. I want to make sure that if she knows about Annie, she tells me before I tell her, so that I capture her spontaneous memory first.
Among Mom’s letters, I had found several from Fran, written in late 1944 when Mom was living for a few months in Tacoma, Washington, near the Army base where Dad was stationed. I offer to send her the letters; it’s an unexpected present for her, and I’m glad to be able to make the offer, because it allows me to give as well as take, something reporters can’t often do. It’s also a good way to win trust.
I lead her into a general discussion of Mom’s family—how well she knew Tillie and Hyman, whether she spent much time with them, what she observed of Mom’s relationship with them. I’d much rather be interviewing her face-to-face than over the phone, where the chemistry is all voice and no eye contact, but the more we talk, the more warmth I feel. Mom came into her life at a critical time.
They met in late 1943, when seventeen-year-old Fran Rumpa applied for a job at the Boston Shoe Shop, the downtown store where Mom worked as manager and saleswoman. Mom, nine years older, became big sister and friend. With Dad away in the Army, the two women frequently went out on the town together, often returning late enough that Mom invited Fran to sleep over. In the morning, they would take the bus to work together. “We were good friends for a good many years,” Fran says, wistfully.
Dad’s cousin Hy, who would come by the store to see Mom, met Fran there. When they started dating, Hy’s mother, the imposing Tante Hinde (who scared me when I was young), made known her displeasure. Fran wasn’t Jewish, and Tante Hinde blamed the whole situation on Mom. After all, Hy and Fran had met at Mom’s store, so it stood to reason—at least, to Tante Hinde’s reason—that it was Mom’s fault.
So Mom and Fran were close, not just coworkers, not just family (after her marriage to Hy), but warriors who had met Tante Hinde in battle and forged a friendship. Surely Mom had told Fran about Annie?
No, says Fran. “I didn’t know there was a sister. There was nothing said about a sister. You say her name was Annie?”
I’m surprised, and yet I’m not. Fran met Mom in 1943, three years after Annie’s hospitalization. This negative space is revealing: It tells me that the secret was in place by 1943, and that Mom was hiding her sister from her closest friend at the time.
“What about Mom’s other friends?” I ask. “Can you remember their names?”
No luck there, either. “She didn’t have many friends,” Fran says, almost apologetically. “She was kind of a workaholic, you know.”
What about someone named Faye? I say. That ring any bells?
“No,” Fran says. “Afraid not.”
Preparing for my first foray into Detroit, I phone David Oliwek, the son of Anna Oliwek. I’m wary of calling Anna directly, in part because I know nothing about her or her health, and in part because of what Sash had said about Anna’s rocky relationship with Mom. I’ve been having trouble finding a good phone number for David, and even now, I’m not sure I have the right one. A message I left on an answering machine a few days earlier hasn’t been returned. This time, though, a man picks up.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Steve Luxenberg, Beth Luxenberg’s son. I think we’re related.”
Without missing a beat, David says, “We sure are. We’re cousins. My mom is a Schlein, and so was your grandmother.”
Excited as I am to finally reach him, I tiptoe around my reason for calling, not wanting to let go of the secret until I understand more about why our two families, living within a few miles of each other for so many years, didn’t have any contact. I tell him that I’m interested in talking to his mom, and he says that she’s away.
Will she be back in a few days? I ask.
“Well, not exactly,” he says, hesitating. “She’s in Chicago most of the time.”
I’m confused. “She’s not living in Detroit right now?”
“It’s a long story,” David says.
He gives me the brief version: His mom and an old male school friend from her hometown in Eastern Europe—the same town, he says, where Hyman and Tillie had come from—had struck up a relationship after all these years. Both had lost their spouses. Three months ago, the widow decided to move to Chicago to live with the widower. “Can you believe it?” David says. “She’s eighty-two years old!”
I ask the name of the town in Eastern Europe, and David tells me, but it’s so foreign to my ear that I can’t even figure out how to write it. Only later, when I see it in print, do I put the spelling with the pronunciation: Radziwillow (or Radzivilov, depending on the era and which country is running the show). And only when I have the spelling can I find it on a map—in present-day Ukraine, in the far western province once known as Volhynia, just a few miles northeast of the old Austro-Hungarian border. The town has gone back and forth between Poland and Russia, but in my grandparents’ time, it sat on the fringe of the Russian Pale of Settlement, subject to the tsar’s laws and whims, not a comfortable place for Jews to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
David and I spend a few minutes climbing around the family tree, filling in the branches with the names of brothers and sisters and cousins, which gives me an opening to slip in my question: Does he know about my mom’s sister?
The clarity of his answer astounds me.
“Absolutely,” he says. “My mother used to go visit her at Eloise all the time. She would drive Tillie there, and she took me along once.”
“You saw my aunt?” I say, hardly able to get the words out. “How can that be? I never even knew she existed until a few years ago.”
“No,” he says. “I was too young to go in. Hospital rules. You know, that was such a horrible place. I can’t blame your mom for keeping her a secret.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“I don’t remember exactly, probably ten or eleven,” David replies. He was born in 1950, so that would put this visit in 1960 or 1961, a new window on Annie’s life.
“You have no idea how amazing this is to me,” I finally say. “I grew up not knowing Mom had a sister, and you grew up knowing all about it. How can that be?”
By the time the conversation ends, I know exactly how that could be. But first, I learn a bit about Anna’s life, an amazing tale in its own right: A Holocaust survivor who didn’t arrive in the United St
ates until 1949, she lost her entire family in a Nazi massacre and then avoided their fate by pretending to be a German, even securing a job as a translator for the Wehrmacht. It’s quite a story, David says, and his mom will want me to hear it. As it happened, she was going to be in Detroit during the ten days that I planned to be there, and David would arrange for us to get together.
“How did she end up in Detroit?” I ask.
“Her uncle,” David says. “He sponsored her—well, my mom, my dad, and my older sister, who was born in Germany.”
What was her uncle’s name?
“Nathan Shlien,” he says.
“I know that name,” I say. “Nathan Shlien was living with my grandparents in 1930, according to census records I’ve seen from that year.”
That’s how Anna found out about Annie—from Nathan, not my mom. She arrives in the United States, with her husband and her baby, and Nathan tells her about her American family—Hyman, Tillie, my mom, and Annie in Detroit, other relatives in New York. This is clear proof: The biggest threats to Mom’s secret were the people who knew Mom and Annie before Annie’s hospitalization. They were outside Mom’s circle, like free electrons, uncontrolled and in their own orbit.
David confirms something else: There was bad blood between the cousins, Anna and Mom—and the secret stood at the center of it.
{ FIVE }
Missing Pieces
The “only child”: a mother-daughter outing
My city is on fire. From our house in far northwest Detroit, more than ten miles from the heart of the riots at Twelfth and Clairmount, we can see the ashy, angry billow of smoke rising from the blocks around Mom’s old neighborhood. It’s Tuesday, July 25, 1967, the day of my fifteenth birthday, but there’s no place to go, and there is certainly no thought of celebrating.
It all began two days before, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, with a routine police raid on one of Detroit’s so-called “blind pigs”—unlicensed, after-hours drinking clubs serving home-made brews, primarily to the city’s black population. We didn’t yet understand how a few arrests at a blind pig (one of four raided that night) could be the spark for one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history, leaving forty-three dead and two thousand buildings destroyed or damaged by the time it was over. On Monday night, all we knew was that the overwhelmed police force had lost control to looters and arsonists, and those in authority—the mayor and the governor—were asking us to stay at home until order was restored.
The previous week, the TV had brought Newark’s urban conflagration into our living room, but those flames felt distant, otherworldly. Now my city is on fire, and I’m full of questions as I watch the seemingly endless supply of images emanating from the twenty-six-inch Philco: Is it possible for so many buildings to be burning? Where are the fire trucks? Why are they called blind pigs? Do police raid them all the time? What do pigs have to do with drinking? Who came up with such a stupid name, anyway?
Together, Mom and I maintain a TV vigil. My brother Jeff, three years younger, must have been there, but I have no memory of him, or of my dad, who was probably at the furniture store, open as usual until 9 P.M., you never know, people might want to buy that loveseat right now, the riots are nowhere near the store, that’s Twelfth Street for you.
The TV camera pans a street of burning buildings, leaping flames, and black-gray smoke against the humid night sky. Mom stares at the screen, cigarette in hand, but her mind is somewhere else, a different time zone, a different planet, a different year. Wherever she is, she’s too far away to hear me.
“That’s my building,” she says. “That’s where we lived.”
“Where?” I say. “Which one?” I never lived in the old neighborhood, so I don’t recognize the buildings. Could it really be the same one? The thick smoke makes it hard to see much, anyway. From the stories she’s told us, though, I have this crystal-clear image: Mom, the only child, living in her third-floor apartment on Euclid with my grandparents, walking to school by herself.
Mom doesn’t reply. She’s still elsewhere, in a time and a place I don’t know.
“Gone,” she says. “All gone.”
Even the streets don’t exist any more: The block of Medbury Avenue where my grandparents lived for seven years of Mom and Annie’s childhood? Obliterated in the 1950s to make way for 1–94, known to my generation as the Edsel Ford Freeway, one of a half dozen that crisscross and encircle today’s Motor City. The Leland School for Crippled Children? Now loft apartments. The building where Mom lived after she and Dad married? Demolished after the riots, replaced by a vacant lot of weeds and broken glass.
In the lengthening shadows of a spring afternoon in 2006, I stare at the barren ground where the apartment building once stood, thinking: I go looking for clues to the past, and what do I find? Empty space. A blank. Even the ghosts have no place to live.
I am a native of this city, but on this visit, I feel as if I’m seeing it for the first time. My search is taking me to unfamiliar places and buildings, but even the familiar haunts don’t look the same. It takes me a while to realize why: reinterpretation. Where once I saw only Mom, now I’m imagining Annie, too. Cruising through Mom’s old neighborhood, studying the old photos to identify any landmarks still standing, I revise as I go: Here is the street where Mom (and Annie) lived. Here is the corner where Mom (and Annie) waited for the trolley. And there, that must be the apartment building where Mom and her parents lived (after Annie went to Eloise).
I leave the neighborhood and turn left at Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main street. Woodward slices diagonally through the heart of the city, the dividing line between the east and west sides, a broad ribbon of road that travels from Detroit’s beginnings at the Detroit River, crosses the northern city limit at Eight Mile Road, and ends thirty miles away in the far northern suburbs. Woodward is a metaphor for the city’s evolution—an entrance for thousands of newcomers and then an exit route during the era of white flight that began in the 1950s and accelerated to warp speed after the 1967 riots.
A half dozen blocks up Woodward, the classical columns of Northern High School, Mom’s alma mater, come into view. In the school’s library, where the polished wooden bookcases and desks hark back to a pre-Internet age, I ask the librarian if she has a 1934 yearbook. I want to see Mom’s photo.
The chief librarian, Shirley Britton, disappears into a little room where the yearbook archive is kept under lock and key, and a few minutes later, I’m holding the black-bound January 1934 edition of the Viking. I flip quickly to the Cs—but there’s no Bertha or Beth Cohen pictured. “Are you sure she graduated in 1934?” she asks.
I extract Mom’s diploma and check the date: January 1934. “She must not have been in school the day they took photos,” Britton says. “That happens, doesn’t it?”
No, she must be here somewhere. But there’s no sign of her in the group photos of clubs and sports teams. She seems to have gone through high school just as she went through the rest of her life before 1942: furtively, leaving no footprints.
Finally, at the end of the graduates’ photos, on a separate page with the headline “Following is a Continued List of the Graduates,” I find her: Bertha Beth Cohen, one of fifteen grads with no picture. Shirley Britton puts into words what I’m thinking.
“She probably couldn’t afford one,” she says. “Not everybody could, you know.”
I still need names. If I want to understand Mom’s world as she saw it, I need to find one or more of her friends from the 1930s, before Annie’s hospitalization, someone who’s not gone. My leading clue comes from the Eloise records: Jacob Robinson. At the time of Annie’s admission to the hospital, my grandparents didn’t have a phone, so they listed Jacob Robinson, their next-door neighbor, as the person to call in an emergency.
I know from census records that the Robinsons had two daughters, Irene and Sylvia, born around the same time as Mom and Annie. I’m hoping that Robinson’s obituary will give me the daughters’ married names, which
is the only way I will find them. I remember what a researcher at the Library of Congress told me one day as we commiserated about the difficulty of tracking women born long ago. “If I were in charge of the world,” she joked, “I would forbid any woman from changing her name when she marries. It just makes our job so much harder.”
Success: As luck would have it, Robinson held prominent court and labor union jobs, and his 1954 obituary, pasted on a yellowing index card at the Detroit Public Library, tells me that I’m looking for daughters Irene Doren and Sylvia Pearce. But then, disappointment: The only women with those names and approximate birth dates have been dead for some time—Sylvia Pearce in 1991 and Irene Doren in 2001.
Gone…all gone.
Edward Missavage proves the old adage that it’s better to be lucky than good. I find Missavage—stumble across him would be more accurate—when I ask a librarian at the Detroit Public Library’s main branch if she can help me find material on the old county hospital known as Eloise. “You should talk to the man doing his own research in the microfilm room,” she says. “He was an Eloise psychiatrist for years.”
I practically sprint to where her finger is pointing. There, in the dark, I ambush a bearded man with bifocals as big as coasters and the bushiest natural eyebrows I’ve ever seen. I lower my voice to library levels, explain that I’m working on a book, and pepper him with questions. “Annie Cohen?” he repeats, then shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid.”
It turns out that Missavage didn’t have much to do with female patients during his nearly thirty years as a psychiatrist at Eloise. He spent most of his time working in the male division, rising to chief eventually. By the time Missavage arrived at the hospital in 1948, Annie had already been there eight years and Eloise had shed its name in favor of something more descriptive of its various missions: Wayne County General Hospital and Infirmary. But like everyone else, Missavage still called the place Eloise. For the next thirty years, except for a brief interlude to serve in the Korean War, Missavage and Eloise remained partners; he left in 1977 as it became clear that Eloise was about to close.
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