Book Review | A Nice (Southern) Jewish Boy

Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries

by Nicholas Lemann

Liveright, 416 pp.

When he was about the age most Jewish boys might be studying to become a bar mitzvah, Nicholas Lemann’s father took him aside for a man-to-man talk—but not about being called to the Torah. This was New Orleans in the mid-1960s, and the German-origin Reform Jewish community, of which the Lemann family was a pillar, had abandoned the bar mitzvah along with many other traditions. 

Thomas Lemann wanted to discuss a ritual that he did value: Mardi Gras. In connection with the annual pre-Lenten festivities, Nicholas had received an invitation to a private costume ball for teenagers, signifying elite social acceptance for both the boy and his family. 

Nicholas must accept, his father said: He was the first Jew ever asked to attend. If handled correctly, the invite might encourage other such gentile gestures. At the same time, Thomas explained, the boy must not include any Jews among the guests he would be allowed. That could reinforce gentile perceptions of Jewish clannishness. A century previously, such uncouth behavior by Eastern European Jews had turned the powers that be within Mardi Gras against all Jews; now there was a chance to undo the damage.

This anecdote sets the tone for Returning, Nicholas Lemann’s eloquent, achingly honest account of life within a tightly knit German-Jewish subculture whose collective response to antisemitism was to fixate on fitting in with gentiles. So axiomatic was the New Orleans community’s assimilationism, and so profound its disdain for Eastern European Jews, that Lemann never tasted lox until after he left home for college. And yet, well into adulthood, Lemann reevaluated, and rejected, the tradeoffs of his family forebears, in favor of a kosher home, membership in a minyan and Shabbat observance. 

Hence the book’s title. Hence, too, its element of surprise: This deeply personal story is not what you might expect from Lemann, a practitioner of cool-headed “neoliberal” policy journalism in its 1980s heyday, who went on to become a New Yorker staff writer, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and author of four books on U.S. political and social history. Returning is partly a family history, partly an extended meditation on the broader German-Jewish experience and partly Lemann’s own confession of a newly felt Jewish faith. The dramas it narrates, and the wisdom it imparts, linger long after the reader turns its final page.

The founder of the Lemann family fortune, Jacob Lemann, was a peddler from the Rhineland who arrived in New Orleans in 1836, moved to the sugar-growing region around Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and made himself into a prosperous merchant. This put him in the middle of a particularly harsh agro-industrial slave labor system, and Lemann’s research discovers, perhaps inevitably, that his ancestor bought no fewer than 18 Black men, women and children and sold them for a profit to others. 

The documentary record is silent as to whether the Exodus story, or other Jewish teachings, affected how Jacob Lemann felt about this. The author ruefully notes “a direct causal connection between his involvement with slavery, which I would consider evil even if he did not, and the life I am able to live today.” Jacob’s ultimate coup was to acquire financially distressed plantations after the Civil War. By the late 19th century, the Lemanns owned all the sugar-producing land around Donaldsonville, as well as the town’s general store. Jews were so prominent in the area that some called it “little Jerusalem.” 

Jacob never converted to Christianity, as did many 19th-century German Jews (including a branch of the Lemann family tree). In fact, his wife was a Catholic who converted to Judaism; his son, Bernard, received a Jewish education in New York. But antisemitism, actual or anticipated, was never far from his or his family members’ minds.

By the early 20th century, the sugar business was in decline and Nicholas Lemann’s branch of the family had relocated to New Orleans. There, generations of Lemann men gained admission to Harvard, practiced law and cultivated a far-flung social network. The author’s grandfather, Montefiore Mordecai Lemann, having shortened his name to “Monte,” formed a law firm with a non-Jewish Louisiana Supreme Court Justice’s son—and became a confidant of Felix Frankfurter, the ultimate German-Jewish political insider. Frankfurter recruited Monte Lemann to advise President Franklin D. Roosevelt on dealing with Louisiana’s populist governor, Huey Long. 

The 20th-century Lemanns had elegant homes, European vacations, Christmas parties—everything, except a sense of security as Jews. Their coping mechanism consisted of reducing visible Jewishness to what they thought gentiles would tolerate. In practice, that wasn’t much. 

In this, the Lemanns were similar to thousands of other Jews—of German and non-German origin. Lemann generously, and wisely, does not pass judgment on his parents and grandparents. Equally wisely, though, he comes to understand that theirs was not, and could not be, a stable modus vivendi.

The Reform Jews of New Orleans declared themselves “a religion, not a race.” But by eliminating outward spiritual display, they gradually eliminated inward spiritual feeling; all that remained, ironically, was ethnic identity. “The payoff from completely fitting in, in the hope of which you give up so much, never quite fully arrives,” Lemann writes. 

In fact, constant calibration of Jewishness turned into a source of anxiety—even indignity, as in that fraught conversation about the Mardi Gras ball. (The son, feeling socially awkward, didn’t want to attend. The father let him skip it as long as he RSVP’d “yes.”) For Thomas Lemann, “a critique of Jews by non-Jews was eternally playing in his head.” This was no way to go through life; antisemitism is about what Jews are, not what they do. As Lemann writes, the lesson of history—especially the history of Germany’s assimilated Jews—is that “there is no way completely to normalize Jewishness” in the wider world’s perception. 

Eventually, prompted by marriage, children and all the questions—bris, schooling, bar and bat mitzvah—that come with them, Lemann acted accordingly. In describing his mixed feelings of fulfillment and bewilderment—he still can’t quite understand all the Hebrew prayers he recites—Lemann speaks for many of us raised in mid-20th-century Reform Judaism who have become more observant as adults and are glad we did. There’s real satisfaction in Lemann’s tone as he reports that his father donned a kippah at Lemann’s son’s bar mitzvah “without protest.”

Returning is superb but not quite flawless. Lemann calls Kishinev, site of the notorious 1903 pogrom, a “village,” when it was a city of more than 100,000 people. In the September 1874 anti-Reconstruction uprising in New Orleans, white supremacist forces initially battled, and routed, a state militia—not federal troops, as Lemann writes. Absorbing as his narrative is, keeping track of the myriad Lemann relatives takes work. 

Still, Returning represents an accomplished writer at the height of his powers—and inspiring in his considered Jewish self-confidence. “The Torah is a sacred object,” Lemann writes in the book’s concluding section. “It contains all the truth in the world. Its continued vitality is a miracle. It is responsible for the continued unlikely vitality of the Jewish people, my people. There, I’ve said it. I know educated, liberal, open-minded people like me are not supposed to have such thoughts, but I do.” 

With those words, Lemann lays claim to a treasure his family could not give him, because they never quite had it themselves: freedom.

Charles Lane is the author of The Day Freedom Died and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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