Call Out the Ghosts: a novel by Joan Wexler

AUTHOR’S NOTE

After the publication of Make Me the Sky, I often thought about the Horvath and Liebermann families. I wondered how they were doing. I missed them all, even the bad guys. They left their homes in Eastern Europe in the early years of the 20^th century because they experienced poverty, humiliation, and violence, only to arrive in New York City, where they often faced more poverty and violence. Through the redemptive power of friendship, love, resilience, and luck, they came to do well in their new country. That is where I left them.
As time passed, I wondered about their ghosts, meaning the persistent and tormenting memories and painful losses they carried from their troubled pasts. For example, how did the untimely death of a beloved, an act of violence or a question of paternity continue to haunt them? Did the ghosts of the elders also haunt their growing children? Did the children have their own ghosts? I decided to revisit them to ask and listen to what they had to say. They answer in Call Out the Ghosts.
Joan Wexler Hamden, CT

Call Out the Ghosts again pulls us into the unfolding lives and minds of characters introduced in the author’s Make Me the Sky. Both novels will at first be read as dealing with the aftereffects
of loss of all sorts, which they do, brilliantly. But they also excel at descriptions of passions, development, and impacts of the world on people, and the impact of those people on the world, while making the reader feel like a participant, not just a witness.”
—DAVID A. CARLSON, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, Training & Supervising Analyst emeritus, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis

“Call Out the Ghosts, Joan Wexler’s sequel to Make Me The Sky (2023) is a haunting, compelling celebration of the lives of the many characters that populate this novel.
The plot is riveting, and the welldeveloped characters each have a singular biography
creating a richly populated tapestry. Wexler’s intimate knowledge of adolescent development,
and the tensions between the generations as they adjust to life in a new country, ring true today. Wexler has woven an enormous amount of history into this intergenerational saga, and her detailed and encyclopedic knowledge of the look and feel of early twentieth century Manhattan—from the Bowery to the upper West Side—provides a rich canvas for the lives of her  characters.”
—SYBIL HOULDING, MSW, Clinical Social Worker and Psychoanalyst, Faculty, Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis

“Call out the Ghosts is a complex, beautifully written, historically accurate novel which
reminds us of the power of traumatic memories, some of which live on in the present.
Thousands of European Jewish refugees arrived in New York City immediately before
or after World War I. Two children of refugees, Adela and Daniel, main protagonists
of the story, lost their mothers when they were toddlers. Unlike some of the members
of their parents’ generation, Adela and Daniel put past losses behind them, cope
with the vicissitudes of adolescence, and move successfully into young adulthood.
They fill us with hope, but Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 is a harbinger of the dangers
that lie ahead for the world.”
—STANLEY POSSICK, MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University
School of Medicine, faculty member, Western New England Institute for Psychoanaly