Returning; A Search For Home Across Three Centuries

 

Title of the book: Returning; A Search For Home Across Three Centuries

Author: Nicholas Lemann

Publisher: Liveright 

Publishing Date: 2026

ISBN: 978-1-63149-841-1

Summary:

Nicholas Lemann grew up thinking he wanted to be Jack Burden, the ever–curious reporter–historian in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men who gets drawn into a web of southern intrigue. Like his fictional mentor, Lemann pulls us mesmerizingly into a three–century family drama, in which he traces the Lemanns from their humble beginnings in Germany to the nineteenth–century American South, where they became Jewish plantation owners and aspirants to New Orleans society. Yet Lemann began chafing against the South’s strict racial hierarchy and his relatives’ eagerness to be accepted in an anti–Semitic environment, including a deliberate blindness to the plight of desperate European Jews. Returning follows the narrator as he rejects this assimilated world and embraces the rites of Judaism. Through its nuanced combination of biography and philosophy, Returning, with its heartrending portraits of generations of family members, becomes one of the most memorable statements about Jewish history in the twenty–first century.

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

Author Info:
(From goodreads)

N/A

Personal Opinion:

In modern days, being Jewish is often tied to being either an Israeli and that goes back to being from Eastern Europe. This book, however, focuses on German-Jewish ancestry few centuries before Nazi took control. While I am of Eastern European background whose family was forced to assimilate in Soviet Union and there should have been things I could relate to, I don't think I was able to, strangely enough. Yet it was a valuable read because it gives me perspective and understanding to Judaism that has faded away. I also was depressed at how the German-Jews saw Eastern European Jews, not as equals but as someone apart (I am really tempted to remind that history makes no distinction between a type of Jew one is; instead, to Jew-haters, Jews are all the same...) There are plenty I enjoyed, namely learning about the author's family as well as the balancing act his ancestors had to do between being Jewish and being the majority and there are a lot of reflections on Judaism itself and attempts to explain how and why his ancestors justified their beliefs the way they did. For a unique and memorable read, as well as something outside the Eastern European experience I would highly recommend reading this story.  

This was given for review

4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)