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.