Throughout his childhood in Louisiana, Nicholas Lemann never attended a bar mitzvah or a brit milah; he never tasted bagels, lox, latkes, tzimmes, or gefilte fish, never consulted a religious text for guidance. His parents never lit Hanukkah candles, never mentioned the Holocaust, Israel, or the Six Day War.
“How did we get this way?” Nicholas asks.
Beginning with Jacob Lemann, a young man who emigrated from Germany to Louisiana in 1836, the author indicates that for his forebears, being Jewish was “a minor and inconsequential fact,” such as “hair color, not to be denied,” but not worth intense scrutiny. And that, in time, “the Jewish question could be made to go away.”
In Returning: A Search For Home Across Three Centuries, Nicholas Lemann (dean emeritus of the Columbia School of Journalism and author of, among others, The Promised Land) draws on his family’s history in a candid, compelling, and immensely moving meditation on identity and his own search for what being Jewish meant – and means – not just “as a cultural style or political position, but as something profound that exists beyond ‘the standard routines’ of life.”
Along the way, Lemann comes to terms with the complex, conflicting legacies of his ancestors.
Lehmans build large fortune from scratch
By the end of the 19th century, the first two generations of Lemanns had built a large fortune from scratch and achieved some status in the communities of Donaldsonville and New Orleans. American citizens, they inhabited economic and social worlds that were distinctly German-Jewish.
Jacob donated money to build a synagogue in the village in which he had been born. Bernard, his first son, attended a Jewish boarding school and became a founder of The Jewish Messenger and the Purim Association.
That said, these Lemanns were also increasingly confident that with doors opening up in the United States and Europe, they could “be Jewish in ways that would not strike non-Jews as strange and threatening,” without renouncing anything important.
That view, Nicholas suggests, informed the decision of Bernard and Harriet to be buried in a tract of Metairie Cemetery, a resting place for elites of New Orleans, purchased by Temple Sinai, New Orleans’s first Reform congregation, rather than in a Jewish cemetery.
More acculturated, educated, and secure, many Jewish German-Americans, including the next two generations of Lemann men, concluded that as antisemitism became understood as religious prejudice, the “tribal identity” of Jews would become far less necessary. “Is it God, who likes to play cruel tricks on the Jews,” Nicholas asks, “or is it fate?”
The Enlightenment, he points out, did indeed reduce the power of religion, but it also empowered “race science,” which would, of course, pose an existential threat to Jews.
In another twist of fate, between 1880 and 1920, two-and-a-half million Jews arrived in the United States, most of them from Eastern Europe, poor, and Orthodox in their religion.
Though not without compassion for their plight, many German Jews, including the Lemanns, feared that the distinction between them and the newcomers, while so obvious to them, was not at all obvious to non-Jews. And, Nicholas reminds us, Zionism, a secular movement rooted in Jewish racial identity, had little appeal to German Jews determined to “blend in, be unobtrusive, and get accepted.”
Something, perhaps his friendship with jurist Felix Frankfurter, Lemann speculates, made Montefiore (Monte) Mordecai Lemann, who was far less religious than his parents, feel closer to European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s than most German-American Jews, including his own relatives. In 1939, Monte supported congressional legislation to bring an additional 20,000 German children to the United States. He raised money for Jewish refugees, helped start a chapter of the American Jewish Committee, and facilitated large contributions to Zionist organizations.
A pillar of his community, contributing generously to a wide range of civic organizations, Thomas Lemann, Nicholas’s father, was “less generous to Jewish causes.” Asked by his rabbi for a donation for a yahrzeit, a tradition scrupulously adhered to by his grandparents and great-grandparents, Thomas replied, “It has been a tradition in our family to observe births rather than deaths.”
He wanted Jewish culture to be “elegant, comfortable in the wider world, especially the upper-class world, free of imposed restrictions, not too conspicuous.” Thomas complained frequently about Jewish “headgear,” prayer shawls, and a preference for salmon, a Scottish delicacy. Rejecting Zionism because it reminded the world of the disruptive presence of Jews as a distinctive people, he tried to prevent any mention of Israel at Temple Sinai.
Returning concludes with Nicholas’s rejection of a “washed-out Reform Judaism and embrace of a somewhat idiosyncratic of Yiddishkeit, initiated, in a sense, at Harvard, and cemented in New York, with the indispensable assistance of his wife, Judith Sulevitz.”
He joined a synagogue, ostensibly because it would give his children a Jewish identity, but found himself crying when the ark was opened, the Torah scroll was carried around the room for congregants to kiss, and everyone sang “Shema Yisrael.” As he wept over his parents’ hope that “other doors would open if they closed this one,” Nicholas permitted himself the luxury of particularism and joy in membership in “a people.”
Acknowledging that some things are beyond reason, “even for somebody trained to revere reason,” and accepting the necessity of making concessions to Talmudic rules and regulations he doesn’t understand or approve, he discovered that submitting “to the undeniable power of ancient prerational wisdom” can be liberating.
“The eternal questions about Jewish life in the Diaspora can’t ever be satisfactorily answered,” this born-again true believer reminds his readers and himself. “We’ll survive, though we’ll never sit comfortably in the world. But the tradition can’t ever, or maybe can’t ever be allowed to, disappear.”
The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
RETURNING: A SEARCH FOR HOME ACROSS THREE CENTURIES
By Nicholas Lemann
Liveright
448 pages; $35