About the Book
Nicholas Lemann, a veteran New Yorker correspondent, grew up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege. Yet in contrast to his parents’ generation, which always sought to downplay their religious background, Lemann was intrigued by his roots, thinking he wanted to be like Jack Burden, the ever-curious reporter in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
And like his fictional hero, who gets drawn into a web of Southern political intrigue, Lemann in Returning delves deeply into the family story—from their arrival in the 1830s as peddlers from Germany, to their becoming plantation owners and department store owners after the Civil War, to their emergence as aspirants in the aristocratic world of New Orleans, where they could never quite belong.
Seemingly more Our Crowd than Yentl in its depiction of a German-Jewish family where young scions matriculated at Harvard and liveried staff served “crustless duck sandwiches” at cocktail parties, Returning, with its parade of colorful family characters—from his grandfather’s cousin, who participated in a campaign to prevent a Jewish state in the 1940s, to his father, a wealthy business lawyer in a Deep South seigneurial city, who took his kids to temple only on Thanksgiving, to his New Jersey–raised mother, who “went into a kind of cardiac arrest of the soul” upon meeting the family—defies easy categorization. Indeed, as the Lemanns climbed the ranks of New Orleans’s high society, their struggles became part of a larger metaphorical story of the challenges faced by Jews, even wealthy ones, who are never able to fit in.
Keenly aware of these contradictions, Lemann began chafing both at the South’s strict racial hierarchy and at his relatives’ eagerness to be accepted in a subtle but distinctly antisemitic environment. Returning then follows the narrator as he rejects this cossetted, assimilated society, embraces religion, and chooses, along with his wife, to raise his children in a Jewish world.
Searchingly asking what it is about antisemitism that allows it to flourish after two thousand years, Lemann uses his own family saga as a springboard to address some of the most urgent questions of our time. Through its nuanced combination of biography and philosophy wrapped into a family history, Returning ultimately becomes one of the most memorable statements about Jewish life in the twenty-first century.
About the Author :
Nicholas Lemann is a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School. He is the author of The Promised Land, The Big Test, Redemption, and Transaction Man. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999, he lives in New York.
Review :
"In this anguished, uncertain, moving, and driven memoir of his pursuit of personal reclamation, Nicholas Lemann writes as the historian of a family, a people, and an idea. How he comes—through love and introspection, and rising finally to a kind of (biblical?) poetry—to the restoration of purpose and integrity may not be intended as a guide for the perplexed, but it will not be surprising if it achieves exactly this.”"
"Returning is a beautifully rendered history, at once highly personal and very broadly cast, and it is a soul-baring story that must?touch us all."
"Lemann sets off on an extraordinary pilgrimage, one that touches on caste systems and ‘ethnic prisons,’ on civil rights, family rifts, and immigration policy. The doors open, the doors close; I lost count of the bruising number of times. But I remain haunted by this clear-eyed, literature-rich, original, entirely dazzling memoir."
"This is a book that sheds insight on difficult historical truths while wrestling with some of the most important issues of our own times as well. A family history, yes, but also a beautifully and courageously written literary memoir that leads its author on the road to self-knowledge."
"Lemann takes readers on an intimate, gripping journey through his own roots, vividly bringing to life generations of Jewish ancestry who struggled to find their place in America."
"What does it mean to belong? Returning offers a profound mediation on family, Jewish identity, and the meaning of home in a world constantly shaken by economic, social, and cultural change."
"What begins as an exploration of Lemann’s family history becomes, quite unexpectedly, a gorgeous statement of devotion—one of the most moving meditations on Jewishness in recent memory."
