Lemann’s New Book is a Tale of Jewish Family Life

The title of Nicholas Lemann’s book, which was published earlier this year, seems to sum itself up before we even crack the first page. It is “Returning: A Search For Home Across Three Centuries.” To be more complete, the author could have added, “Across Three Centuries of Jewish Life,” because that is what this distinguished writer, who is a former professor and dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism has presented us.

He spent years researching his family’s history in America, digging through old family records and reminiscences in New Orleans where he grew up and traveling abroad to Germany, where his great-great-grandfather lived, before he emigrated to Southern Louisiana in 1836.

His life as a peddler in the rural 19th century South soon leads to the establishment of a general store and financial success. His newfound wealth lends to a career as a money lender to the slave-holding sugar plantation owners who are his neighbors. When they default on their loans, he takes over their slaves and their plantations.

In the 20th century, he follows his grandfather, Monte Lemann, to a career as an attorney and friend of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his patron, President Franklin Roosevelt. At one point Roosevelt summons him to Washington to hear his thoughts about the rise of Gov. Huey Long, for a time a political rival of the president.

In this long and superbly researched and written history, Lemann seeks to understand the evolution of the family and their chosen way of life as Jews.
Indeed, in that respect it is not unlike the Torah portion that is read this week in our temples and synagogues. It is the parsha of Lech Lechah, the story of how the son of a Mesopotamian pagan merchant of sacred ceramic figurines who cast off his origins to strike out a new life and a new land that his new faith will show him.

Like Abraham, Nicholas Lemann became a searcher, first venturing from the comfortable, assimilated life in his cosseted Southern home to a world that is far different from the one from which he came. As he looks back, he begins to understand that his early life of privilege and wealth came with a price.

It meant that in the many years his father worked in the practice of law, he was never invited to his law partner’s club for lunch, because Jews were not allowed. And, despite a full-blown Christmas celebration on Christmas Day, dining on roasted suckling pig, served by Black servants in white starched uniforms, there was always the stinging sense of exclusion and separation in a society where the Lemanns were still outsiders.

The descendants of German Jews who had made their place in this hot house culture of New Orleans practiced a kind of classical Reform Judaism where rational humanism replaced many of the traditional religious obligations and practices. Growing up in New Orleans, Lemann, as a boy visited Temple Sinai there, every year with his father, but only on Thanksgiving Day. His brief religious education at the temple was cut short when his father objected to the rabbi’s Zionist leanings. He didn’t experience a Passover seder until he was a Harvard undergraduate.

In many ways, he grew up in a liberal Jewish community in Atlanta that Dr. David Marx encouraged when he was the leader of The Temple in Atlanta in the first half of the 20th century. Dr. Marx had been, after all, part of a generation of Reform rabbis that remembered the treyfa banquet at the Highland House restaurant in Cincinnati. It honored the first graduating class of the Hebrew Union College seminary in 1883.

It is a world that Nicholas Lemann turned his back on later in life and it is that gradual turn about that gets a full airing in the last chapters of the book. He married for a second time in 1999 and insisted that his father wear a kippah during the ceremony, the only time he remembers his father covering his head during a Jewish ritual.

With his new wife Judith Shulavitz, he kept the Sabbath, became part of a Saturday morning minyan, studied Torah regularly, and traveled to Israel. In 2010, Shulavitz wrote about their life, “The Sabbath World- Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.” which was published to lavish praise.

As the tile of his own book suggests, after all his years of wandering, Nicholas Lemann seems finally home. And, with his new home, this wandering Abraham has found his beloved Sarah.