Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries

by Nicholas Lemann

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.

Genres: Memoir, History, Nonfiction, Jewish, Religion, Biography, Audiobook

416 pages, Hardcover

Published March 24, 2026

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A detailed family saga and reflection on being torn between two worlds that will never quite fit together. While it was interesting at times, there were stretches that didn't hold my attention, and I cannot say this wowed me in any way resembling the press it's been getting. It was better than okay, but not outstanding or especially captivating to me in any way. I don't really know how to rate or review this one to be quite honest, and I'm not certain about what contexts I'd recommend it in.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most compelling and riveting family memoirs I’ve read in a long time.

[Sascha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and RBMedia for the e-ARC!

“Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries” is a vivid historical account of the author’s family, touching on everything from Zionism and integration, Southern Judaism and the Confederacy.

Historical works about Judaism often center around the experience of European Jews and the countless prejudices they face (obviously). While “Returning” certainly doesn’t stray from these Jews, the experience of distinctly American and distinctly Southern Jews take center stage. What about the Jews that chose to hide their Judaism in order to further assimilate? What about the Jews that were enslavers, Jews that were plantation owners, Jews that defied abolitionism? What about anti-Zionist Jews after the creation of the state of Israel? How did Jews fit into a broader Southern cultural context?

Both an exhaustive work of non-fiction and an impassioned lecture from a well-liked professor, your eyelids will droop with sleepiness at times. But at the end, you’ll be better for having read it, but I must recommend listening to the audiobook. Read by the author, I found Nicholas Lemann’s narration to be at once soothing and invigorating. The audiobook clocks in around 14 hours, but I found 1.5-1.75% speed to be comfortable and digestible. Besides, you just have to hear how he pronounces “New Orleans.”

Lemann tackles these questions and more in this beautifully comprehensive memoir. He shies away from none of the gritty details of Southern history while managing to place them in an appropriate cultural context. “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries” eagerly approaches topics in intersectionality with a refreshingly bipartisan lens. Jews and gentiles, Southerners and non-Southerners alike will find something of interest here.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Nicholas Lemann's family history is thought provoking and fascinating. He writes about three centuries of the Lemanns and gives us valuable insight into their Jewishness (and those around them) starting in Germany and culminating in the United States. The most impactful aspect for me is his own honest perspective on antisemitism, racism, and slavery in a world different (yet the same) from the one his ancestors lived in. The Lemanns settled in Louisiana which was both a blessing and a curse, or, as the author put it, Canaan or Egypt?

Being a Jew, culturally and religiously, is discussed at length. Also described in detail is history about Jews spanning many centuries. The first massive killings of Jews occurred in 1012 by the Crusaders followed by many other instances of suffering throughout time. In medieval ages, in Germany they lived as a separate tribe with dietary laws, education in Jewish schools, and self governed. But they were also barred and banned from non-Jewish life. More recently, a relative of the author said he was ashamed to be a Jew when he saw how they lived and behaved during a very difficult time in history. This disheartening revelation shows how Jews can view other Jews. Of interest is views on slavery on sugar and cotton plantations in the deep south.

All in all, this is an insightful and raw book which integrates views on Jewishness over a long slice of time, at arms-length yet familial, different from anything I've read.

[Lukas Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Returning, Nicholas Lemann skillfully weaves 300 years his own family history into Jewish history. Starting in Germany and settling into Louisiana, Lemann addresses slavery, antisemitism, and antizionism and the reactions in history around Jewish migration and successes.

It's fascinating to hear what was going on where his family was and for how Jews influenced different events and movements throughout the world. Lehman's view on what Jewish life looked like both in the day to day and in the synagogue is an interesting view on how Judaism has both changed with modern society and stayed the same.

I love history and I still learned more listening to this book. With such a long stretch of history, Lemann balances well sharing enough details to give a good overview and not getting bogged down in one time period or the other. The audiobook narrator spoke clearly and cleanly while still feeling natural. His pace and tone kept me interested.

[Carriefeibel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for American Jews from the first wave of immigration (from German lands and Western Europe). As a Jew from St Louis with roots in Ohio, this book articulates my cultural and psychological patrimony with almost unnerving accuracy. it’s a nuanced, moving, even at times suspenseful personal memoir of the fate of a Jewish family that settled in antebellum Louisiana. It also serves as a social history of the different strands of American Jewry and how they established themselves economically, culturally and geographically — including the mostly forgotten histories of American Jews who were anti-Zionist and had a surprising and complex reaction to the Holocaust and American anti-Semitism. This is a beautiful elegy to a vanishing era of achievement, assimilation, and aestheticism in American Jewry.

[Barbara Lipkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lemann's exploration of his family's American experience is extremely interesting. I've always known that German Jews are different from 'us,' those of us whose background is Eastern European, and who came about 80 or so years after the Germans did. I never gave it much thought, although my mother would sometimes say, disparagingly, that they were 'stuck up, snobby, always thinking they're better than anyone else.' My mother occasionally came out with statements like that, so I didn't really pay any attention. But now, reading Lemann's book, I realize she was actually right. They did (do?) think they're better than the rest of us. As a Jew, and as an avid student of history, this book adds a new layer to my understanding of the Jewish American experience. The telling gets a little dry in parts, and could benefit from being somewhat shorter, but all in all, a very worthwhile read.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do I begin? What a multi-layered fascinating book. I listened to the author read it on audio. The long history of his German-Jewish family and their generations in Louisiana was wonderful. But what really moved me was the no-holds-barred approach to the plight of Jews everywhere, the shame and often disgust of the German Jews toward later Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US, and how the German Jews comported themselves in order to fit into a strict Southern caste system to the point of almost erasing their Jewishness. There is much that is enjoyable about the book but also so much that is truly painful to confront but so thought provoking. I recommend this book wholeheartedly.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells the story of the author’s family, which is descended from a German Jewish immigrant to Louisiana and his Cajun wife (she later converted to Judaism). The title refers to the author’s own desire to live a “more Jewish” life as his family and community environment were heavily assimilated (example: his Reform synagogue offered “confirmations” to early teens as bar and bar mitzvahs were frowned on).

I’m not Jewish myself but I found that the book held my interest: Lemann is a great writer and I learned a lot from this work. Ultimately the book speaks to the tensions within families and the choices people make as they navigate their lives.

[Arnold Grot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was encouraged after reading “The Edge of Space-Tme” where the author in her final message that we are writing our future together and that thinking about our shared heritage and the good stuff in the universe can help us grow through the challenges facing us in finding solutions that honor our ancestors and one planet that we know sustains life. Leeann ends his book with the same message.
Let’s hope we will build that future.

[Deke Moulton]

DNFing - I think the underlining surprise of this book is to find out Jews lived in south… And for someone who knows that and who lived in the south, a lot of this just felt incredibly underwhelming. Like I think if you are not aware of this history, it’s gonna be very gripping or at least land differently. But for me, kind of these declarative statements that “Jews lived in New Orleans!” just met with a lot of “and?”

It seems like a lot of people are liking it so it’s probably just me.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

My experience reading the book didn't match the level of enthusiasm I'd been hearing but I think it was more because of the density and overabundance of details rather than Lemann's personal story. Also, in the last section, I was disappointed that a brief political statement he offered was missing actual fact.

[Ellen Sherberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense (sometimes too much so) family history through German Jewish Southern lens. The research is impressive. The South seems oppressive. I was more interested in the family than in Lemann’s own spiritual journey. It seems that could have been another book although I clearly understand the connection.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone searching for the Jewish roots and living a Jewish life now.

[Scott Milliken · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a towering, moving, profound, thoughtful work this is. Cannot recommend this highly enough, even to other goyim.