Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries

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.