Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop

by Joseph Lelyveld

The profoundly moving family history of one of America's greatest newspapermen.

As his father lies dying, Joseph Lelyveld finds himself in the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where Arthur Lelyveld was the celebrated rabbi. Nicknamed "the memory boy" by his parents, the fifty-nine-year-old son begins to revisit the portion of his father's life recorded in letters, newspaper clippings, and mementos stored in a dusty camp trunk. In an excursion into an unsettled and shakily recalled period of his boyhood, Lelyveld uses these artifacts, and the journalistic reporting techniques of his career as an author and editor, to investigate memories that have haunted him in adult life..

With equal measures of candor and tenderness, Lelyveld unravels the tangled story of his father and his mother, a Shakespeare scholar whose passion for independence led her to recoil from her roles as a clergyman's wife and, for a time, as a mother. This reacquired history of his sometimes troubled family becomes the framework for the author's story; in particular, his discovery in early adolescence of the way personal emotions cue political choices, when he is forced to choose sides between his father and his own closest adult friend, a colleague of his father's who is suddenly dismissed for concealing Communist ties.

Lelyveld's offort to recapture his family history takes him on an unforeseen journey past disparate landmarks of the last century, including the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964. His excursion becomes both a meditation on the selectivity and unreliability of memory and a testimony to the possibilities, even late in life, for understanding and healing. As Lelyveld seeks out the truth of his life story, he evokes a remarkable moment in our national story with unforgettable poignancy.

Genres: Memoir

240 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Joseph Lelyveld was executive editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and interim executive editor in 2003 after the resignation of Howell Raines. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Reviews

[Chiara Coletti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Omaha Blues, a memoir by former New York Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld, is a meditation on the lives of his father, mother and a family friend, the three most enduring influences on his life. He traces the complicated and remarkable stories of his father Arthur, a Zionist rabbi from Ohio and Omaha, his mother Toby, a restless intellectual and undisputed beauty, and their friend, variously, Ben Goldstein and Ben Lowell, a Communist rabbi and passionate baseball fan, all three the loves of his life. In many respects, Joe Lelyveld's own life is torn asunder by the clashing obsessions and ideals of his parents, and healed by the outcast Stalinist who always finds time for him. And yet Rabbi Ben Goldstein/Lowell seems more of an intruder than a valid player in this story. Because of the fascinating and even heroic lives of the main characters, I wanted to love this book (and also because of my respect for Lelyveld when he was the Times editor), but I often found it belabored and overwritten. The very best parts were the descriptions of Rabbi Lelyveld's bloody experiences as a valiant freedom fighter in Mississippi and the story of the final meeting between him and Toby.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reminded me greatly of Nabokov's autobiography, because of how serpentine its retelling was. It was well written and multilayered, but I must say it was hard to keep track of the events because it moved so quickly and centered so much on his parents. It was a pretty in-depth account of a fascinating life. I enjoyed it and would recommend especially because it it a quick read.

[Marianne Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

The next time I feel sorry for myself in my childhood, I will remember this boy. He taught the word AntiNostalgia (anti nostalgia) and how to bear it. He took me on a tour of my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama and he didn't shock me. He inspired me to rise above my raising and make a better future for myself and my family.

[John Moeschler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lelyveld was a former executive editor of NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/bu...) who spent childhood years in Omaha to his rabbi father and scholarly though mentally ill mother. He calls this a "memory loop" rather than memoir playing with the notions of failures or missteps of memory. Interesting but not a terribly good book.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a memoir that reminded me at times of the wonderful Updike's Consciousness, an easy equal to Nabokov's Speak, Memory for me. Lelyveld's book reminded me of Updike mostly for the sense of Americana in the 50s, the small towns, the suburbs, tthe images then, the atmosphere. For the rest, it is nothing like Updike's really, and mostly that's due to two things: the middle part of the book, and the failed attempt at getting on with his idea of a memory loop.
That idea starts the book off, and sounds really interesting, except that Lelyveld rather lets go of it, and occasional mentions of the term later add nothing to the concept, nor to its exploration. Updike's Conscioussness really sees memory as a loop, as a self-feeding thing; Lelyveld sees it all too chronologically, mixing also some basic psycho-analytical ideas that are at times a bit tart.
So the most promising concept really gets lost in the narrative early on.
The middle part deals with a fleeting, yet central, figure in Lelyveld's past, who appeared, then disappeared again: Lelyveld tries to reconstruct the past of that man, what he did, what happened to him. And there Lelyveld's past as journalist takes over, and that reveals what the books really is: not a memoir, but an inquiry, a quest: a story.
This middle part reveals all that because, really, Lelyveld is on a quest to understand himself as shaped by others, whose life he then wants to understand. But that makes his book more a history book (with admittedly very interesting bits on Communism in the US then) than a personal one.
So a good attempt but either the real idea of the book was flawed (in terms of memoirs), or Lelyveld was no writer: a great journalist no doubt, and a great editor to boot, but not a writer.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this memoir because I had a sense of a parallel life. At least, for awhile Joseph Lelyveld's family was in Omaha, not too far from Kansas. I believe he was a bit older than I am. Anyway, Omaha and Kansas, but that is where any similarity ends. His family was known on a national level, and they had enough money to act on impulses rather than just sticking things out. I especially like reading about Joseph Lelyveld's view, as an adult, of the family friend who took him to ball games and generally was a warm mentor.