World of His Fathers

Near the beginning of Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, Nicholas Lemann quotes from Robert Penn Warren’s searing and, for Lemann, talismanic novel All the King’s Men (1946), set in Louisiana, where he was born. The narrator, Jack Burden, writes that his story “is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once.”

Lemann’s story, too, is about how the world looked one way to him and then slowly, over time, another and very different way. Dean emeritus of the Columbia Journalism School and a scrupulous social historian, he notes that his previous books (my favorite is Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War) were mostly about the South and race, “the ever-present and unmissable ordering principle of everyday life.” But now, in Returning, he has turned his considerable investigative skills on his family, its antebellum past, its connection to Germany, and above all its complicated and ambivalent relation to Judaism. And to a certain extent this research precipitated a change in him—although more likely it had already begun to occur. Or so he wonders, since he realizes that in his twenties he’d already been experiencing a “tug in the direction of Jewishness.” Not that he didn’t know he was Jewish. But that was about all he knew.

Adept at separating the unseen from the seen, Lemann here chronicles his family’s accumulation of wealth, whatever the moral costs or compromises, and their subsequent acculturation and partial deracination. But he is also writing a Thoreauvian spiritual autobiography whose aim is the shucking off of any vestige of quiet desperation, which, in his case, is something felt but unnamed for many years—except his progenitors aren’t New England Transcendentalists. Closer to him, again, is Jack Burden, that failed journalist and anguished historian who can’t write history because it doesn’t mean what he thought it meant. Or there’s Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), the depersonalized wayfarer in search of something like salvation or at least release from an unnamed spiritual malaise.

The family story more or less begins with Jacob Lemann, who arrived in New Orleans from Germany in 1836. In a matter of a few years this former peddler had opened a store upriver in Donaldsonville, first in his house and then in the town square, and was advertising goods for sale that came from as far away as Cincinnati and New York. This suggests that “outside of Louisiana other German Jews extended credit to him…. They spoke the same language,” Lemann wryly observes. He also recalls another passage from All the King’s Men. When the populist demagogue Willie Stark orders Burden, journalist turned gumshoe, to dig up dirt on a local judge, Burden demurs; certainly there are no skeletons in the office of the good judge. “There is always something,” Stark says.

There’s always something, indeed. Donaldsonville was located in the center of the state’s thriving sugar industry, which was rife with planters growing wealthy on the labor of the enslaved. Jacob became quite prosperous; in less than ten years he was also buying and selling human beings, whom he considered underpriced assets. By 1856, just twenty years after he arrived in Louisiana, he had sold his store, bought a house in New York City, and become a financier in sugar country, loaning money to planters who put up their property (and doubtless the enslaved) as collateral. When some of these planters defaulted, Jacob repossessed their plantations. “You could not enter the town,” Lemann writes, “without passing through Lemann lands.” Jacob acquired at least twelve plantations, though ironically the “central animating myth” of Jews “was of their liberation from slavery.”

“Shouldn’t Jacob, as a Jew, have seen the wrong in slavery?” Lemann asks. After all, he had remained an observant Jew. Although he married a Catholic, Marie Berthelot, she soon converted to Judaism, becoming Miriam. Their son Bernard, Lemann’s great-grandfather, attended a religious boarding school in New York run by a Dutch-born rabbi as well as the secular private school Collegiate. (Lemann’s family investigations center on the patrilineal.) A German Jewish youth of considerable means, Bernard observed Jewish holidays, went to the opera, protested against the Catholic Church’s abduction of a little Jewish boy in Bologna, and read Dickens and Longfellow and Shakespeare. To avoid being drafted into the Confederate Army, he decamped to Europe at the outbreak of the Civil War on a kind of grand tour, visiting Paris and Geneva and Stuttgart and Hamburg, where he also read essays about the “Jewish question”—whether Jews “should be admitted to modern society.”

Once back in America, Bernard “attended to business,” Lemann coolly notes, though during Reconstruction, life was hardly easy for anyone—least of all Blacks, Republicans, and even Jews. Donaldsonville’s mayor, the German Jewish Marx Schoenberg, was a Radical Republican who was mysteriously murdered in 1870, perhaps by the Confederate veteran who also claimed to be mayor. Still, in the troubled postwar period, business was basically good. Jacob, who had reopened his Donaldsonville store when its purchaser defaulted, was now a retailer, creditor, planter, and factory owner (converting cane into molasses and processed sugar)—a veritable “back-country tycoon,” Lemann writes. And now, too, the Lemanns, as landed gentry, were no longer “sleazy Jews…. Success brought respectability.”

Though the family coveted such respect from—or acceptance by—the wider non-Jewish world, there is no indication that they wanted to deny their Jewishness. Bernard married a New Orleans woman from another affluent German Jewish family, his siblings likewise married German Jews of the same socioeconomic class—often financiers and businesspeople—and when their mother, Miriam, died, the rabbi who had performed her marriage to Jacob in accordance with Jewish law presided over her funeral. And though committed to maintaining a Jewish life in America, they also remained for a long while connected to Germany, which they often visited. For his entire life Jacob wrote in German, but German rendered in Hebrew characters.

Yet according to Lemann, the family believed, as many German Jews in America seemingly did,

that Jews could be Jewish in ways that would not strike non-Jews as strange and threatening—that we could join the wider world without being penalized for being Jewish, and without penalizing ourselves by giving up too much of what we were.

To Lemann this is, in part, delusional.

Wealthy, well-educated, well-regarded, the Lemann family became members of Temple Sinai, the first Reform synagogue in New Orleans, which had been organized by German Jews, including their own relatives, in 1870. The post-Enlightenment practices of the Reform movement had replaced much of traditional religious observance with rational humanism—in other words, the Reform movement, according to Lemann, had liberalized many of the strictures of Jewish law, reasoning that “Jewishness could be stripped of its ritual and tribal aspects and still survive and thrive.” One did not have to keep kosher, for instance, and services could be conducted in English. When the local Jewish country club held a dance on a Friday night—the beginning of the Sabbath—and the rabbi at Temple Sinai sent a reproving editorial to the local Jewish paper, he was called to task by the temple’s board.

The third generation of Lemanns, then, were Reform Jews who had confirmation ceremonies instead of bar mitzvahs or might hear organ music in the synagogue. The first rabbi of Temple Sinai had even managed to purchase land within the elite and non-Jewish Metairie Cemetery so that its members wouldn’t have to be buried in a Jewish one. (The reverse is unimaginable.) These were ways, Lemann explains, of “making a happy fit between Jewishness and the wider world.” But it also seems, he adds, that these were “merely attempts to imitate the goyim, in sincere admiration and the hope of winning their approval.”

These Lemanns mostly stayed in Louisiana, though many were no longer involved in the family business, and Lemann’s paternal grandfather, Montefiore Mordecai Lemann (known as Monte), was reared to occupy a leading place in secular America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he and the non-Jewish son of the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court opened a law practice that represented banks and utilities. Though Monte could not save the faltering plantation business, the Donaldsonville store continued for a time to thrive; after it burned down in the 1870s it had been rebuilt to elegant specifications, with tall windows resembling arched tablets. One of Monte’s siblings who had remained in Donaldsonville married into a renowned Catholic family and raised his children as Catholic.

Monte Lemann was respected, well liked, a veteran of World War I, and for a short time an informal political adviser to Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in Washington. He was, to a certain extent, what Lemann calls a court Jew—one with special expertise who serves as an adviser to Pharaoh or the prince (as in the case of Mayer Amschel Rothschild) or the duke (as in the case of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer) or some other noble house. But such status always depends on the prevailing political climate. Oppenheimer was hanged after the death of his patron. Or consider the well-educated German Jewish Leo Frank, a factory manager in Atlanta who was lynched in 1915 by a mob that believed he had raped and killed a white girl. More benignly, Monte was one of the founders of the New Orleans Country Club, which soon adopted a policy banning Jews. (Weirdly, Lemann’s father, a member by inheritance, didn’t resign.)

Of course the German Jewish community was busy erecting its own barriers, particularly against the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews who began flocking to America in the late nineteenth century and whom they considered unsavory, loud, and possibly radical. German Jews were wealthy and cultivated; Eastern European Jews were not. German Jews had made a relatively comfortable place in America for themselves: first come, first served, sort of. They had made a determined effort to “blend in, to be unobtrusive, to be accepted,” while the newer Jewish immigrants, they believed, were inspiring renewed outbursts of antisemitism. “To combat anti-Jewish prejudice,” Lemann drily writes, “would be to do something about them, not to do something about prejudice.”

When Walker Percy encouraged the Jewish writers in New Orleans to tell their stories, Lemann realized that he could not. He simply did not know enough, and his ignorance, he said, “was the product of a fiercely enforced family policy.” That ignorance grew in part from a desire to assimilate. “It would be better for the Jews to try to go unnoticed,” Lemann again drily notes, when writing about the opposition among German Jews to Felix Frankfurter’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1938. When they claimed that a specifically “Jewish seat” on the Court was unwarranted—and a Zionist-leaning Jew like Frankfurter might draw too much attention—they were in fact revealing “an intense awareness of the pervasiveness of antisemitism,” he shrewdly remarks.

After Hitler rose to power, many prominent German Jews chose to downplay the danger that Jews in Europe faced. When Temple Sinai’s rabbi, Julian Feibelman (a Lemann relative by marriage), received letters from Jews in Germany pleading for help, he ignored them, and as for the chilling news that the Nazis intended to exterminate all Jews, he said they’d never have such a plan, the rumors were implausible, and it would be far better for Jews to keep quiet. Feibelman’s point of view was not shared by Monte, who in the spring of 1939, after Kristallnacht, testified in Congress on behalf of a bill granting 20,000 German children sanctuary in the United States. It never came to a vote.

Monte’s son Thomas (Lemann’s father) avoided what Lemann calls any “sense of Jewish particularity,” which included any mention of Israel at Temple Sinai. Thomas, a refined German Jew, deplored Zionism. “Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal,” Lemann writes. Paradoxically, Maximilian Heller, a leading Zionist in the Reform movement, had served as rabbi at Temple Sinai for forty years. But Rabbi Heller’s kind of Zionism grew out of a different sort of bias: that Jews were building a paradise on unoccupied, uncivilized land.

Having learned of his family’s participation in slavery, Lemann speculates hopefully that his grandfather’s somewhat advanced, if paternalistic, position on civil rights may have been connected somehow to his sense of himself as belonging to a minority. Commenting on the backlash to the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Monte wrote to his longtime friend Felix Frankfurter, “We can never hope to eliminate all bigotry. (Look at the experience of the Jews for 5,000 years.)” As one of the founders of Dillard University, a historically Black college in New Orleans, Monte had long hoped that the Supreme Court would declare segregated public schools unconstitutional, and after the Brown decision he tried unsuccessfully to persuade a group of southern lawyers and law school deans to call for compliance with it and help end Jim Crow.

And yet Monte Lemann wore his religion lightly. He rarely went to services. Though he was obviously aware of antisemitism, it’s hard to know how he felt about being Jewish. He had married Nettie Hyman, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish New Orleans cotton broker. They traveled to Europe for long summer vacations, bought clothes in Paris, and frequented a number of spas, since Nettie suffered from tuberculosis. Their son Thomas followed to a large extent in his father’s footsteps. His friends were the children of his father’s friends. He was educated at the non-Jewish Metairie Park Country Day School, driven there every day by a chauffeur. Like his father, he attended Harvard and graduated from Harvard Law School, and he served in World War II. He entered his father’s law firm. He married a brilliant young Jewish woman, Barbara London, a Wellesley graduate who was studying psychology at Harvard—strangely, she administered a Rorschach test to her intended husband, which he evidently “passed.” She also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and treated it with cortisone, which had long-term deleterious side effects. That, her eventual use of amphetamines and barbiturates, and her occasional disappearance into treatment programs suggest it wasn’t easy being a female Lemann.

The couple settled, inevitably, in New Orleans, where despite her initial qualms about what she dubbed the “land of Charm,” and whatever her rebellions, she subsided into the existence of the upper-class German Jews there, ministered to by Black servants in white uniforms. When Thomas came home from the law office, his son, Nicholas, shook his hand and said, “Good evening, sir,” before the butler announced dinner. Nicholas and his sister attended Country Day, as their father had, where one of the students might roll a penny past Nicholas’s desk to suggest that as a Jew, he would obviously grab it. A warm writer, Lemann recounts these chilling anecdotes largely without comment, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. Mine is that there was an awful hollowness at the core of privilege.

Lemann grew up, then, in a cosseted world, and though aware that he was Jewish, he partook in nothing typically associated with Judaism. He never had a bar mitzvah. His family celebrated Christmas, with an ornamented tree and a wreath on the front door and a dinner of roast suckling pig. He never had bagels and lox before he went to college. Yet Jews in New Orleans were excluded from the leading Mardi Gras organizations and prestigious social clubs. Jews and non-Jews did business together, they largely respected one another, but they inhabited very different social worlds.

All this was assumed. In 1976, at Thomas Lemann’s fiftieth birthday party, one of the guests, the “master arbiter of New Orleans high society,” toasted him: “The most Christian man I know is a Jew, Tommy Lemann.” Thomas’s eyes were wet. He was moved. His son understood: “At least in our surroundings, everything about Jews was not okay. That was why it was so important that we establish that we were unusual Jews, not like most Jews.” But Lemann is touchingly sympathetic toward his genteel, sidestepping father, who professed not to know what sitting shiva meant and probably never wore a yarmulke until 1999, when he attended his son’s wedding.

Perhaps the most striking symbol of denial, exclusion, self-protection, and poignant resistance is the grand home that Thomas Lemann built for his family and named Quercus, short for Quercus virginiana, the Latin name for live oaks. A huge live oak tree stood in the center of a plaza in the front of the house, and the live oak in the backyard could be seen through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. Designed with the assistance of an interior decorator from New York and a landscape architect from San Francisco, Quercus was filled with large abstract paintings bought by Lemann’s mother on his parents’ many European excursions. There were two libraries, books everywhere, and the stone and brass sculptures that Thomas collected. It was something of a seigneurial showcase.

Quercus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, though far less than the rest of New Orleans, and Thomas Lemann remained there until his death in 2023 at the age of ninety-seven. He stayed as active as possible doing what he’d always enjoyed: accumulating art, though now online. After his death, when Quercus was sold, Lemann recalled Buddenbrooks, one of his mother’s favorite novels, about the inescapable dissolution of a self-important patrician family and the social order it represented. In Donaldsonville, the old B. Lemann and Brother store had gone out of business, and the building was eventually converted into apartments, Lemann Art Lofts.

To Lemann, however, it’s the Torah that endures. And here, his own story really begins, his narrative solidifies, and makes the family history and genealogy make emotional sense. For this constitutes his “returning.” “The Torah is a sacred object,” he lovingly explains. “It contains all the truth in the world. Its continued vitality is a miracle. It is responsible for the unlikely continued vitality of the Jewish people, my people. There, I’ve said it.” With a certain awe and a certain humility, he admits that “it’s hard to explain in the language I’m accustomed to using to explain things, but the Torah’s power, for those who choose to submit to it, is undeniable. It endures. Nothing else endures.” Anything less—such as being “culturally Jewish” without any real commitment or connection to Judaism—strikes him as shallow and, at worst, duplicitous. At least for him.

More discomfited than he knew, then, by his family’s determined denial, or repression, of Jewish life and rituals—though he was clearly distressed by those pennies rolling down the aisle—he bursts into tears during a bar mitzvah when the thirteen-year-old boy recites the Shema, realizing that

access to this aspect of Jewish life, of the lives of my family going back hundreds of years, through an unimaginable variety of circumstances, had been shut off to me, as firmly as a metal door being welded shut…. Now the door was open.

Having sought “a submerged Southern liberal tradition I could identify with” and then desiring “some access point to what being Jewish meant,” Lemann finds the latter with Judith Shulevitz, a fellow journalist and his beloved second wife. “She’s a Jew first and everything else second,” he writes. Together they keep the Sabbath, or try; he discovers holidays he did not know existed; they go to Israel; and he and Judith pray with others in a minyan on Saturday mornings and read sections of the Torah or the Haftarah (the prophetic literature). Again he is both an insider and an outsider (he can’t read Hebrew), but he is nonetheless a member of a community, both one in the present and one that extends into the past.

Lemann ends his book by returning to All the King’s Men, when Jack Burden decides to “go out of history into history.” And that brings him into the present. After October 7, 2023, he is confronted not just with the appalling slaughter of Jews in Israel but also with the abhorrent war that the Israeli government is waging on Gaza and its civilians. The president of Columbia asks him to serve as cochair of a task force on antisemitism. This is just a few months after his father’s death. (“I’m not sure I would have been comfortable accepting the offer,” Lemann tellingly reflects, “if he’d been alive.”) As a member of the task force, he hears stories from many Jewish students about mezuzahs being ripped off doors and Zionists barred from certain clubs. “The old dream that there might be a completely easy way of being Jewish (at least in the way I have chosen to be Jewish) in the wider world,” he observes, “seems once again to have vanished.”

He says little more about the task force or the wrenching complications of today, when competing points of view about Israel, Zionism, Gaza, and antisemitism are being hotly debated in the Jewish community. Careful not to sound prescriptive, he is writing a book—to paraphrase Gertrude Stein (also Jewish)—for himself and strangers. His map, which points toward home, takes him where he has clearly yearned to go. His youngest children wear the Star of David on silver necklaces. And one night, when someone on the street sees it on his son’s neck, he shoves the boy, calling him a “dirty Jew.” At home, Lemann hugs his child; fathers and sons now embrace.

Lemann’s true subject, then, is this homecoming, his coming home and knowing where he’s been, as if for the very first time. Earlier in his book he imagines the Torah passage that he might have read at his bar mitzvah, had he had one. It concerns God’s injunction to Abram and Sarai to “go forth from your native land.” After their many years of wandering, after many years of war and betrayal, God creates a covenant with Abraham and Sarah (now renamed) and promises that their descendants will someday be given the land of Canaan. Fascinated by this story of longing and displacement and confusion and miracle—and of patrimony—Lemann wonders if his forebear Jacob Lemann, that iniquitous slave owner and savvy capitalist, might have been a seeker, aspiring to a live an emancipated life free of restriction. Or maybe he was hoping to jettison the very restraints foisted on him by the non-Jewish world in order to recover later “the incomparable rewards of Jewish life.” Impossible to know. “That’s a choice his descendants have had to make too,” Lemann comments, “including me.” He has chosen.