In the Land of Charm

Ages ago, or so it now seems, American Jewry experienced its very own Great Awakening. Beginning in the 1970s and crescendoing in the 1990s, thousands of young, well-educated men and women, largely the products of the suburbs, forsook the practices of their parents and embraced traditional Jewish beliefs and rituals. A network of brand-new institutions and initiatives sprang up to fuel the curiosity and assuage the hunger of these returnees, or ba’alei teshuvah, who were changing the face and content of organized Jewish life in the process.

Academics took note, which gave rise to a lively literature devoted to figuring out the appeal of “tradition in a rootless world,” as sociologist Lynn Davidman titled her landmark study. These new traditionalists, especially if they happened to be women, were looking for “certainty and fulfillment,” she noted. They sought to “create a new sense of self within communities of memory.”

Much like the great awakenings of the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the ba’al teshuvah phenomenon eventually lost steam, which is probably why I hadn’t thought much about it in decades. Recently, though, I found myself thinking about little else, my musings prompted by Nicholas Lemann’s poignant, searching, and richly detailed account of his own return to the fold. His is somewhat more recent and, in some ways, more complicated than the stories that Davidman and others have told, but he, too, has sought to re-create himself in a community of memory.

Marching to its own beat, set against a panorama of consequential historical moments in American history—immigration, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement—Lemann’s tale doesn’t so much neatly align with the extant literature as expand its parameters. It’s as much a reckoning with the past as it is a returning to it. History rather than halakha is its engine, the South, especially New Orleans and its environs rather than Suwałki or Slobodka, its context.

Organized effectively into three sections—Leaving, Arriving, Returning—the book closely follows the trajectory of the Lemann family as its progenitor, the biblically named Jacob, sets out in 1836 from Essenheim, Germany, for the New World and finds a home in Donaldsville, Louisiana—the heart of sugar country—establishes roots, flourishes, and multiplies. As the family’s various branches relocate to New Orleans in the course of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, where they succeed in leading “plummy” lives, they increasingly see themselves as loyal sons of the South. It was, in the memorable words of Lemann’s New Jersey–born mother, Barbara, “the land of Charm.”

By the close of the twentieth century, the Lemann family numbered 643 souls, many of whom were no longer Jewish. “There seemed to be no end of them,” Nicholas Lemann recalled when, as a youngster, bored to tears, he was taken on yet another Sunday afternoon visit to the relatives. One of their number, his cousin Bernard, had the foresight to assemble a copious family archive, which he subsequently donated to Tulane University. The Lemanns, it turns out, were not only a well-cushioned bunch; they were an unusually well-documented one too.

Despite this bonanza of material, Nicholas Lemann spent decades avoiding it. Though hardly a stranger to the difficult and unsettling aspects of American history—a former dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a contributing writer for The New Yorker, he’s an acclaimed historian with several highly regarded books on the nation’s racial order to his name—Lemann stayed clear of these holdings, fearful of what he might find. He writes:

Maybe I was afraid of what the family papers would reveal: a past I wouldn’t be proud of. It wasn’t until decades later, and a lifetime of investigating everything but this, that I decided it was time to look.

Once he summoned up the courage to open up Pandora’s archive, Nicholas found the tug of his family history hard to resist. Immersing himself in bills of lading and snippy Dun & Bradstreet ratings of Jacob’s business acumen (“Is pretty shrewd in business, but owed his success greatly to good luck; never was known to lose in a transaction”), he also familiarized himself with the richly detailed pocket-sized notebooks kept by his great-grandfather Bernard, whose contents ranged from the dates of the Jewish holidays to his impressions of the larger world (“What a delightful country this is to live in & enjoy life,” he wrote in Paris). Lemann didn’t stop there. In the hope of getting closer to his great-grandfather, he followed “Bernard’s tracks as a reader,” making his way, as Bernard once did, through Dickens and Goethe, Jane Austen and George Eliot.

Lifting his head from the page, Lemann, together with his wife, the Atlantic writerJudith Shulevitz, made a point of visiting Essenheim, Germany, in search of the family’s lingering presence. They were in luck. A thick slab of stone, a remnant of the local synagogue, bore an 1857 Hebrew inscription that indicated that the building had been a gift from Jacob Lemann.

These and other discoveries prompted Lemann to write his family’s history. What resulted was, to some extent, what he had feared: an unvarnished account of ancestral complicity in the cruel racial system that defined the Deep South. They had owned and trafficked in slaves; repossessed the property of plantation owners who defaulted on loans; and become major landowners, who, for decades, internalized the lost cause as their own, seemingly without missing a beat.

That’s only part of it. Lemann was equally attentive to the role their Jewish identity had played in their lives and how, over time, it came to define his own. Zigging and zagging, making itself felt only to recede before reemerging yet again in a new form, the dynamic by which each generation of Lemanns laid claim to or evaded its Jewishness is carefully, sensitively mapped out. Identity, this Lemann comes to discover, is no mere bequest, static and undemanding, but a process, a negotiation, perhaps even a covenant.

Revelations abound. Shortly after arriving in New Orleans, Jacob Lemann married Marie Berthelot, a Cajun Catholic. Twenty years later, the couple temporarily relocated to New York City, where Marie converted to Judaism. As Miriam, she remarried Jacob in a traditional Jewish ceremony presided over by Max Lilienthal, then on his way to becoming a leading Reform rabbi (and abolitionist). This book features their ketuba.

Bernard, one of their sons, attended the prestigious Collegiate School in New York; traveled widely; met his wife, Harriet, at a Purim ball; returned to Donaldsville in the wake of the Civil War; opened a store (Its business card, which Nicholas Lemann reprints, reads, “Dealer in dry goods, clothing, notions . . . iron, steel, nails, paper, liquors, &c., &c., &c.”); prospered; married; and had ten children. When, in 1872, New Orleans’s Temple Sinai—a Reform congregation with two distinctively Semitic minarets on its exterior, a thousand gas jets modernizing its interior, and a seating capacity of 1,300—dedicated its sanctuary, Bernard and Harriet numbered among its proud, confident members.

Their son, Nicholas Lemann’s grandfather, was born in 1884 and named after two legendary Jewish heroes, one relatively contemporary, the other downright ancient: Moses Montefiore, the peripatetic philanthropist of the mid-nineteenth century, and Mordecai, Queen Esther’s uncle. Nicknamed Monte, Montefiore Mordecai later held two undergraduate degrees, one from Tulane, the other from Harvard. A graduate of Harvard Law to boot, he became a celebrated New Orleans lawyer and a close confidante of Felix Frankfurter, whose influence prompted him to be “distinctly more tribal than most German Jews.” Monte Lemann took a stand against antisemitism, testified in Congress on behalf of a bill to aid German Jewish children, and was sympathetic to Zionism. He also became Frankfurter’s “man on the scene” when it came to civil rights and spent the “final years of life being pulled, as if by a strong tide, into the race question, even more than he was into the Jewish question.”

Following in his father’s footsteps, Monte’s son, Thomas, also attended Harvard College and Harvard Law, became a member of his father’s law firm, and built a beautiful home for himself and his family to which he gave a botanical Latin name: Quercus (as in Quercus virginia), in recognition of the stately southern live oaks that graced the property. By the mid-1950s, when Thomas’s son came into the world bearing the name Nicholas, lavish Christmas parties and festive Easter egg hunts at the family homestead as well as a once-a-year visit to Temple Sinai—Thanksgiving was their high holiday of choice—defined the household’s calendar.

Anything manifestly Jewish was held at arm’s length, off limits, lest it ruffle the Lemanns’ unruffled, charmed existence. As Nicholas Lemann writes in a succinct but hard-hitting passage, Father and Mother chose actively to “de-identify.” It wasn’t that they disavowed their Jewish background or pretended to be Episcopalian, though short of converting, they certainly lived as if that’s who they were. In a town where everyone knew everyone and everything about them, any attempt to hide who they were “would have been impossible anyway.”

What, then, did being Jewish amount to chez Lemann? As their son comes to understand, his parents’ relationship to their Jewishness wasn’t just a deliberate exercise in attenuation, though it certainly looked that way, but an act of protection, a cordon. It was a way of ensuring that being a Jew didn’t ruin things any more than it had already, things like membership in New Orleans’s most prestigious social clubs or holding the enviable position of a Mardi Gras king. “We were insiders who were also outsiders,” Lemann astutely observes. “We led comfortable lives that had very strict limitations.”

In practical terms, being Jewish for this generation of Lemanns amounted to absences, negations, and silences. It entailed knowing the words for “Dixie” but not Hatikva, of being familiar with gumbo but not gefilte fish. So distanced was Nicholas Lemann from the customary trappings of popular American Jewish culture that his Jewish friends, upon learning that he was a member of the tribe, were taken aback. Growing up, he explains:

I didn’t know any Yiddish expressions, even oy. I had never eaten at a delicatessen. I had never lit Hanukkah candles. I wasn’t aware of knowing anybody who had ever been to Israel. I had never been to a bar mitzvah.

Parental silences were especially telling. Any mention of Zionism or the State of Israel was out of bounds, as was talk of the Holocaust or, for that matter, any discussion of the wholesale destruction of the German Jewish project of emancipation, on which several generations of Lemanns had banked their existence. “To absorb, let alone confront, the destruction of the German Jews in Germany,” Lemann writes, was like a “violation of natural law.”

Yet something called to Barbara and Thomas’s son, “pushing itself to the fore,” inspiring him not only to exhume and recover his family history but to render his newfound Jewish identity an active presence in his own life. Having painstakingly retrieved his Jewish identity from the archives, he wanted it to mean something, to be “consequential,” though what that amounts to for Lemann is never fully resolved:

The harder question to answer is why I have chosen to accord a special reverence to my tradition. Is it just that it’s mine? Or that it has lasted so long? . . . Isn’t the idea of commandedness fair to use as a way of capturing this? You’ve got me there. Not every question has a perfect rational answer.

Finding the right answer turns out to be a gradual process that, in retrospect, consumed much of Lemann’s adult life. Leaving home for good, not just for college (he, too, attended Harvard) was the first step, choosing to become a journalist rather than join the family law firm the second. Subsequent decisions entailed becoming a member of a suburban New York Conservative synagogue with his first wife, attending Shabbat services with his two sons, and acknowledging the deep emotions that welled up “unbidden” when attending the bar mitzvahs of friends’ children. “What was happening—why the dramatic effect?”

Lemann’s searching became more sustained, richer and deeper, once he met Judith Shulevitz, who became his second wife. In the course of his courtship, he encountered her family whose “baseline assumption was that being Jewish was great in every way, a source of boundless gratification and pride.” Rather than recoil as he had been taught to, “I loved it. I felt liberated. . . . Everything that had been bottled up could be uncorked.”

Kippot, kashrut, Shabbat, day school for the son and daughter he had with Judith—the whole nine yards of a traditional Jewish life—became his portion. Nicholas Lemann had turned into someone who was “alarmingly Jewish from my family’s point of view.”

It’s not simple, nor is his adjustment complete: He candidly admits that eliminating gumbo from his diet is not in the cards and that the Hebrew language continues to elude him. Exchanging the family’s customary reticence for forthcomingness, sugarcoating nothing, he recounts the fits and starts of his personal transformation in generous, intimate detail—often at considerable emotional cost too, or so one suspects. At times, the book reads as if it were wrung from him, heightening the readers’ experience. “It’s never simple or easy to be Jewish,” Lemann admits. “It’s always complicated—externally and internally. That’s what I’ve had to struggle with as I have spent my adult life trying to return to it.”

What gives these pages a special charge is how the two dimensions of Lemann’s story—the American and the Jewish, the personal and the collective—form an integrated whole. Yes, it’s the story of America, of how one immigrant family made compromises and made good. At the same time, it’s the story of the modern Jewish experience, of the imprint of choice on personal identity. Within the compass of Returning, the two components—the American and the Jewish—walk hand in hand. Artificial divisions of the sort into which politicians and textbook authors shoehorn the varieties of American identity are nowhere to be seen. Instead, readers encounter something that feels right, truer to experience: its essential porousness.

Readers also encounter something that feels like fate. How else to account for the fact that Nicholas Lemann ends up a member of the same Manhattan congregation to which Jacob, the founding father of the Lemann clan, had belonged approximately 150 years earlier?