Jews have been part of America since its inception. Many people know this in the abstract, but it takes a book like Nicholas Lemann’s Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries to show just how linked Jewish and American history are. Written with the keen eye of a journalist, the perspective of a historian, and the love of a grandchild, Lemann charts the course of five of his family’s generations in America.
The book begins with Lemann’s great-great-grandfather Jacob who left Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, settled in New Orleans, and rose from peddler to the owner of a dry goods store. With this success, Jacob planted the seeds for the thriving of later generations. Jacob’s ancestors would own land, including plantations; attend Harvard law school; and find audiences with President Rosevelt. The book, in a way, feels like a Jewish version of Forest Gump, as the Lemann family find their way into some of the most consequential events of the past two hundred years.
Although various generations of the Lemann family left New Orleans — finding their way back to Europe or New York — New Orleans remains at the core of the family’s identity. Lemann speaks passionately of the struggle for Jewish acceptance in the Marti Gras krewes. He charts the internal politics of New Orleans synagogues, including one at which his great uncle served as rabbi. And he wrestles with the history and legacy of slavery in the city, a trade in which Jacob participated.
Later in the book, Lemann turns his attention away from his family’s story and toward his own. After chronicling his first marriage and his early secular relationship to Judaism, he explains how his marriage to Judith Shulevitz brought him back into the fold. Lemann spends the end of his book talking about the power of his Shabbat community and the challenge of being Jewish in a time when Israel has become a pariah.
Lemann’s nuanced defense of Israel later in the book is especially telling in light of the account only a few chapters before of his father’s passionate anti-Zionism. In a way, Lemann’s discussion of Israel serves as a microcosm of the book as a whole. Returning charts a series of cycles: from religion to secularism to religion, from the south to the north and back again. It shows that families are often in dialogue with their past even as they constantly evolve.
Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries is for anyone who wants an intimate story with universal themes that will challenge and inspire us, and make us think about our own families’ stories.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is author of the books Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) chosen as a finalist for the PROSE award and The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort (Turner Publishing) which was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
