Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries by Nicholas Lemann

Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive, Returning emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time. 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 Read more

From the Publisher A CONVERSATION WITH NICHOLAS LEMANN, AUTHOR OF "RETURNING" Was there a precipitating event or particular reason that suddenly made the history of your family—a story you had been avoiding—feel urgent? What changed? I think it was about getting to an age when you begin to think about settling up accounts. What haven’t you done that it would be a shame not ever to do? For me, investigating and recording my family’s history fell into that category. Another thing about aging is that you begin to think of yourself less as an individual and more as a link in a long chain—so you want to know about the previous links, partly for the benefit of the links yet to come. As you went from being a member of your family to also being a chronicler of it, what responsibilities did you feel when writing this book? Memoir writers, and sometimes also novelists, are notorious for alienating their families. When I started out as a writer, I turned my attention outward partly to avoid this. But I also think it can be somewhat vain, not to mention straining credulity, to present yourself as the hero in a family of villains. Life isn’t like that. I wanted to be completely honest, without being judgmental in a facile way. And, as a writer, you can’t be too motivated by wanting to spare people’s feelings. So far I have been relieved that most of the relatives I’ve heard from are grateful to know our story in much greater detail than they had before. What possibilities opened up for you as an author by writing a personal, family saga, as opposed to a more traditional history? In traditional history, you’re influenced by what you think, but you are not supposed to put thoughts, memories, and impressions directly on the page. For this kind of project you can. Much of this book is based on archival research, but being able to go beyond that amounts to an additional set of tools to add power to the story. In what ways does this history of one, unusual family transcend the circumstances of these individuals and speak to a larger condition of having to negotiate between acceptance and one’s identity in America? Ours is a highly particular story that touches on universal American themes. Very few people have no “identity” at all, and very few identities make for a perfect, frictionless fit with life outside one’s own community. Strictly observant Jews have a hard time participating in the wider world, and may not want to; fully assimilated Jews often stop being Jewish at all, or their children do. I don’t think my own group is the only one for whom it’s not easy to find a location between the two poles. What would you like readers to take away from Returning? My research showed me, and my title implies, that life doesn’t move in only one direction. Through the generations, my family has been alternately more or less American, more of less Southern, more or less Jewish, and more or less admirable by our present-day lights. That’s okay. Life isn’t a series of simple, including morally simple, binaries. Thinking of it in that way rarely makes anyone happy, and it constrains one’s ability to make one’s own life, which is always possible.