Annie's Ghosts

by Steve Luxenberg

  Hail, hail, the gang’s all there—Mom, Faye, Irene, Julie, the names from Mom’s letter. I tell Julie about my interview with Milton Pierce, Sylvia’s husband, who’s ninety now and still making the daily trek to his office at Guardian Alarm, the company that he had built from nothing into one of the largest in the Midwest. His two sons run the business now. “He said he remembered my mom well, but that he didn’t know anything about Annie. Do you think there’s a pattern here?” I joke. “Husbands in the dark?”

  I was still having trouble getting a bead on Mom and Julie’s relationship. How close were they? Did Mom confide in Julie? (Then again, did Mom confide in anyone? Certainly not Fran, who slept over at Mom’s on many a night in 1943 and 1944, and yet told me she knew nothing about Mom having a sister.) I decide to find out.

  Julie, I say, did you ever hear Mom talk about Joe, a guy who wanted to marry her? Or an uncle who promised to help pay for her to go to college, and then backed out?

  Julie shakes her head. No, she says, neither one ring any bells.

  “I don’t think we ever thought about college. I never thought about college,” she said, emphasizing the “I” and laughing merrily. “We weren’t very good students. We were more interested in boys.”

  I say something about how the world was different then, that women had fewer opportunities than they might today. Julie, who eventually made a career as a marriage counselor and taught workshops on assertiveness training, thinks about that and says, this time without a smile, “Well, my dad never really encouraged us to go to college. We were supposed to help him in the shop.”

  Ellen hoists another photo. This one I’ve seen before—no, it’s similar to one I’ve seen before, it’s from Mom and Dad’s wedding day, but a little different. I thumb through my cache, extract a photo, and place it next to Ellen’s find.

  A match. My photo shows Faye, Mom, Dad, and Tillie. The other shows the same foursome, wearing the same clothes, plus two more people—Julie and a tall man in the foreground I don’t recognize.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  Julie puts on her glasses again. “That,” she announces, “is your grandfather.”

  It’s the only photo I’ve seen of him in middle age.

  “Now,” I say, “if only I could find one of Annie.”

  On a brilliant summer day, the kind that makes me want to cancel my interviews and go for a long walk in the Michigan countryside, I pull into the parking lot of Baker’s Restaurant in the small town of Milford. I’m finally meeting Adam Plizga, the trustee for the estate of Irene (Robinson) Doren, Mom’s friend and next-door neighbor in the Euclid Street apartment building during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  It has taken several months of serious phone tag to get to this rendezvous. First, I tracked down Irene’s son, Barry, hoping that he would let me look through his parents’ collection for photos of Mom and—fingers crossed—Annie. “Sure,” Barry had said. “But I don’t have them.” For reasons that weren’t quite clear to me, Irene’s photos had remained in Adam’s hands. But Barry had no problem with me looking through them. “Call Adam and tell him I said it was okay.”

  I spot Adam as soon as I walk through the restaurant door—he’s the guy with the large box as a lunch companion. But if I had any image of the accountant I had been chasing for months by phone, it wasn’t anything like the man waiting for me. A long gray-streaked ponytail rests neatly on the back of his polo shirt; the glasses perched precariously on his nose create the image of an aging professor preparing to show a colleague the fruits of a year’s research.

  “Hi,” Adam says, pointing to the box. “They’re all here.”

  By the time Adam and I had arranged to meet, I had learned that my mom and Irene had been more than next-door neighbors, more than two young women living with their parents in claustrophobic apartments of the kind that served as home to many Detroit Jews in the mid-1930s. The parents came from the same part of Europe, immigrated to the United States about the same time, had two daughters of about the same age. But there the similarities ended. Jacob Robinson’s successful rise in the Wayne County clerk’s office, and later in the local AFL-CIO leadership, contrasted starkly to Hyman’s peddling on the streets and intermittent laboring in the auto factories.

  Whatever had drawn the two families together, it created a bond that flourished and endured until the end of their lives. And this was no ordinary bond: After Tillie and Hyman moved to another apartment building several miles north of the one on Euclid, Katie Robinson, by now a widow, rented the unit right next door.

  In my imagination, this long friendship extended to their daughters as well, and included the sorts of activities typical of two urban Jewish families. If the families spent time together, why wouldn’t they go shopping at Hudson’s downtown store, or take a Sunday picnic to Belle Isle, or have Shabbos dinner together on Friday nights? And perhaps someone had a camera and took a few snapshots to remind them of these happy times? And if I were lucky, among the photos would be one that included Annie…

  That was my writer’s fantasy, of course. I could think of a dozen reasons why Irene’s collection might not include photos of my mom or Annie. In the 1930s, the camera remained largely the preserve of special occasions: holidays, weddings, birthdays, formal portraits. I had been lucky at Julie’s to find the photo of Hyman on Mom’s wedding day and the one of Mom as a bridesmaid at Sylvia’s wedding. But that wasn’t surprising: The camera had a recognized and valued place at marriage ceremonies.

  Did Annie ever go to a wedding? I couldn’t imagine that she did. That’s what other girls did, normal girls, and as the Routine History said, Annie didn’t consider herself one of those girls, she didn’t live in their world. In that world—a world that called girls like Annie “slow” and “cripple”—how likely was it that someone would raise a camera lens to record her presence?

  As my hands reach into the carton on the seat next to Adam, a voice in my head is saying that no matter how long I search, no matter how many of my mom’s childhood friends I find, no matter how gracious these strangers are in allowing me to rummage through the very boxes that they would likely grab first if the house caught fire, it was unlikely that anyone had ever taken Annie’s photo.

  Adam sees the envelope of old black-and-white photos first. He hands them to me. “There may be something in here.”

  Halfway through the two dozen or so photos, I see my mom. It’s another shot from Sylvia’s wedding day—this one is just the two of them, bride and bridesmaid posing for the photographer outside an apartment building, their shoulders touching, their veils motionless, their wedding outfits so bright in the sunlight that the camera is having trouble handling the glare. My mom, at five foot six, stands a good two or three inches taller than Sylvia. Over her bridesmaid’s dress, she’s wearing a full-length white coat; next to the folds and pleats and gathers of Sylvia’s gown, the coat’s long unbroken run emphasizes the difference in their height.

  Adam and I keep looking, and out of another envelope tumbles a shot of Tillie with Irene and Sylvia’s parents, the Robinsons. So the families did spend time together! That gives me hope that Annie might turn up yet. It takes us a good two hours to look through every album and envelope, and when we’re done, no photo of Annie emerges. “Too bad,” Adam says. “I thought for a minute, when we saw that one with the Robinsons and your grandmother, that we might be in luck.”

  But we find a second one of Mom, again as a bridesmaid, again towering over her companions, two fellow bridesmaids. At the bottom, in Irene’s hand, a date: “May 30, 1937.” Mom is just nineteen at the time, and she looks a little more gawky, a little more awkward in this shot. I pull out a Ziploc bag containing copies of photos from other family albums that I’ve tracked down in the past several months, extract two photos of young women in white gowns, and lay them on the table.

  “My mom,” I tell Adam, “as a bridesmaid at two other weddings.”

  Love and marriage may go together l
ike a horse and carriage, as Frank Sinatra would croon in the song from the 1950s that Mom liked so much, but in the early 1940s, it was war and marriage that went together. After Congress debated and then enacted the Selective Training and Service Act with a provision exempting married men from a military draft, the country witnessed an unprecedented marriage boom. In New York, so many couples wanted to tie the knot in August 1940 that lines formed as early as 6:30 A.M. outside the marriage license offices in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Draft exemptions weren’t the only factor in the surge, but they were the accelerant that produced a record number of marriages in 1941—a record immediately topped in 1942. Manny’s wife, Shirley, whose family owned a catering business in Syracuse, remembers working as many as five weddings on some days in 1941. “It was crazy,” she told me. “Everyone wanted to get married.”

  The fever infected Mom’s circle of friends, judging by the rising demand for Mom’s services as a bridesmaid. What about Mom herself? As far as I know, she had only one brush with a marriage proposal before Dad, from Joe, and I always had the sense that Joe’s offer predated 1940. But it didn’t matter: Joe wasn’t Jewish, so he had no chance. Like many Jewish women of that era, Mom couldn’t conceive of marrying outside the faith—not because she was especially religious, but because, as she once said in telling the story, “I couldn’t do that to my mother.” I grew up thinking that Joe (Mom never used his last name) was a metaphor for disappointment, for dreams unfulfilled, for the road not taken. In retrospect, Joe might have been part of the reason why I didn’t identify with observant Jews. If being observant meant that you couldn’t marry the man you loved, that didn’t seem like such a good deal to me.

  I don’t know if Mom was as bent on marriage as Julie, but there’s no question that Mom was in love with the idea of marriage, head over heels about it. Yes, she had dreams that went beyond finding a man, but none that excluded love, marriage, home, and family. There’s certainly evidence that she was worried about her marriage chances: She told Marty Moss that she feared she would never find her soul mate, that marriage would pass her by, and she fretted to Julie that she was too old (at the advanced age of twenty-four, a laughable thought for today’s generation, but not for Mom’s).

  So when she went (where else?) to that wedding in June 1942, that fairy-tale wedding where she looked down the staircase and spotted the stranger with the silver streak in his hair, it’s hardly surprising that Cinderella was more than ready to meet her Prince Charming, perhaps even a little anxious, anxious enough to declare impulsively, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

  But anxious enough not to tell her Prince about her sister? Julie thought so. I was beginning to think so, too.

  The old neighborhood—my old neighborhood, the one where I grew up, in Detroit’s northwest corner—looks dowdier than I remember, but I suppose that’s inevitable for modest, low-cost bungalows in the depths of middle age. When my parents bought the newly built house on Houghton in 1950, the newly paved street ended at the corner, giving way to the old dirt road on the other side of Fargo, and the newly planted saplings offered no relief from the summer sun that baked the newly planted grass.

  Now, as I drive slowly along the well-shaded streets, I’m finding it hard to get my bearings. The field where I played Little League baseball? Still there, but so changed that I stop for a moment, wondering if I’ve come to the wrong place. Where are the fences? The benches? The huge backstop? No, wait, this must be right, there’s St. Eugene, the place where Mom went to the annual Little League banquets, except that it’s not St. Eugene any more, it’s a charter school. St. Eugene is long gone, closed in 1989, a casualty of declining enrollment.

  But elsewhere in the neighborhood, some things look more or less the same. There’s the driveway (so small!) where my best friend and I chased our hoop dreams; there’s the gravel playground where I once sent a foul ball through a neighbor’s window; there’s the house where Mom and Ethel did battle in Scrabble. Did Mom tell Ethel, her best friend, about Annie? I’d ask her, but Ethel’s gone, too; she died in 2005. Of the bridge game quartet, only Ann Black is alive, and I haven’t been able to find her.

  I’m not going to find her here; the old neighborhood yields only memories.

  David Oliwek still lives in the house where he grew up, and with his mom in Chicago, he has agreed to show me the papers that document her Nazi deception—her Arbeitsbuch, the major’s letter of recommendation, Anna Prokopowitsch’s identification card. As we go through the records, I tell him that this is exactly what I need—names, dates, specifics—to flesh out the story and confirm crucial details. “It’s hard to work off memory alone,” I say. “Your mom’s been really helpful, but she can be vague sometimes.”

  David hesitates, and then says, “Oh, she knows how to keep a secret.”

  This doesn’t sound like an off-hand remark, or a reference to Anna’s deceiving the Nazis. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  And that’s when I learn that Anna, like my mother, was guarding a family secret of her own.

  Anna wasn’t hiding a sister. She was hiding a husband.

  Here’s how it came out: About ten years ago, as David was trying to chase down the family genealogy, Anna asked him if he could find someone she knew from her childhood, a man named Warshawsky. David came up with information that suggested that Warshawsky had survived the war, and was living in the Soviet Union. After 1952, the trail went cold. When David reported back to Anna, she urged him to keep looking.

  “I said to her, ‘Mom, why are you so interested in this guy?’” David recounts. “And she said, ‘Because I was married to him.’”

  David doesn’t know many details. His mom told him that she and Warshawsky married just before he left Radziwillow to serve in the Russian army, and that she never saw him again.

  She was sixteen, maybe seventeen.

  “Did your father know?” I ask.

  David smiles, aware of certain parallels in the two stories, between his mom and mine. “She says he did know. She just didn’t tell her children.”

  David wasn’t sure why his mom was so eager to find out what happened to this man. David’s father had died a few years earlier, in 1991, but David didn’t think that Anna really wanted to get in touch with Warshawsky after all these years, if he were still alive, which seemed unlikely. She had gone to a few Holocaust survivors’ conferences, so maybe that had stirred up some feelings—sorrow or guilt, or a mixture of both. Or maybe she just wanted to…know.

  Yet more reinterpretation: I would need to go back to Anna, find out what happened, why she left this out of her story about Radziwillow.

  Yes, I’ve become a collector of family secrets.

  My cell phone rings as I’m driving home, several weeks later. I can see from the screen that it’s Mary Jo. I pull over.

  “Manny called,” she says. “He talked to your uncle Bill, and he says Bill knew about Annie.”

  I’m speechless. If Dad’s younger brother knew, wouldn’t Dad have known? And if Dad knew, then I’m back to square one in figuring out what caused Mom to create the secret.

  “What else did he say?” I ask, finally locating my voice.

  “He said he didn’t want to ask Bill too many questions,” she says. “He thought he should leave that to you.”

  { TWENTY }

  Reinterpretation

  Killed where they lived: The mass gravesite near Radziwillow, Ukraine, 2007 (Mary Jo Kirschman photo)

  Mom and I are playing Upwords, her favorite board game, a kind of Scrabble with skyscrapers. It’s February 1999, five months after the spill that sent her to a Seattle hospital with a fractured pelvis. Healing took many long and painful weeks, and she’s still not her old self. Upwords takes her mind off her problems; I’ve lost count of how many matches we’ve had since my son Josh and I arrived yesterday for a weekend visit.

  Josh, who’s fifteen, bounds over to the table, proposing to play Mom next. He’s a novice player, and nervous abo
ut whether he can hold his own against the master, so I know that his offer is his way of connecting with her. I’m pleased for both of them; Mom is devoted to her grandchildren, and infinitely patient in teaching them the tricks and strategies that can make the difference between winning and losing. That’s why I’m shocked when she looks at him and says, “No. I just want to play with your dad.”

  I’m irritated at myself for not calling Uncle Bill earlier. He’s been on my list, but I hadn’t seen any urgency. He seemed like such an unlikely candidate to know about the secret; he was so much younger than Dad, sixteen years younger, and I couldn’t imagine why he would know if Uncle Manny didn’t. But Bill had lived with my parents for a while during the late 1940s, so maybe like Medji, he had the experience of being there when the unexpected came up. What else could it be?

  I reach him in Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Lil have been living for more than a decade, moving there from California. We don’t see each other much, so when Lil answers, I make my apologies for calling out of the blue. Because of Bill’s conversation with Manny, he’s expecting my call. No reason to tiptoe toward the topic.

  “Tell me what you know about Mom’s sister,” I say.

  “It’s not something I’d thought about for years,” he says. “When Manny mentioned it, I remembered that I knew about it.”