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Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries
Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive, Returning emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time.
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.
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.
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Published March 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
July 2, 2026
Simply magnificent. (Do not be misled by how long it took me to read this one—travel and then life intervened and kept me from continuing to turn its pages for several weeks.) In a just literary world, this book would receive multiple awards beyond those specifically for Jewish books. Time will tell.
April 9, 2026
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.
April 4, 2026
One of the most compelling and riveting family memoirs I’ve read in a long time.
July 27, 2026
A master work and a must read for anyone who wishes to understand the American Jewish experience over the last few hundred years. The story is his story, is the Jewish story, and to some extent the Southern story. The author, a distinguished professor and former dean at Columbia University, tells his family story. His ancestors emigrated from Germany in the 1830's and settled in New Orleans, some were slaveholders before the Civil War, and many were very successful. He tells the story of the Southern Jews, ultra - Reform (he tells how his family would have a roast pig for Christmas dinner, but never even considered lighting Hanukah candles or celebrating almost any Jewish rituals). But despite this they and the members of their Reform Temple valiant attempt to assimilate, they could not. He notes that although they acted, spoke, and had the means equal to or more than, the upper crust non-Jews of New Orleans from the nineteenth century until well into the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and 70's, they were not still considered welcome. They were still Jewish, and there were limitations of how far Jews could go, even those as successful as the author's family.
With the arrival of modern political Zionism, all the values of his relatives and ancestors were turned upside down, because this once again showed that the Jews were a people, not just simply a slightly different church such as Methodist vs. Episcopalian or such. The role of the community during the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, as the author notes, was not something that he or anyone who is Jewish should be proud of.
The last part of the book is the author's personal journey toward a more observant and more connected Jewish life with both his first and much more with his second and current wife. The reaction of his father (his mother had passed away) is almost humorous, the story of his father putting on a kippah for perhaps the first time (a bit had to believe) is kind of funny.
Most books about the American Jewish experience concentrate on the East European Jews who began to come by the millions in the 1880's and their experience, sort of the Phillip Roth Jews. The earlier, mostly German origin Jews who came in the early 19th century and especially those outside of New York are less described. The author gives their story, especially interesting because it is his story and that of his family. His perspective on his ancestor's approach to Judaism is fascinating, now that he lives are far more observant and connected Jewish life.
This is one of the best Jewish history/memoir books that I have read.
With the arrival of modern political Zionism, all the values of his relatives and ancestors were turned upside down, because this once again showed that the Jews were a people, not just simply a slightly different church such as Methodist vs. Episcopalian or such. The role of the community during the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, as the author notes, was not something that he or anyone who is Jewish should be proud of.
The last part of the book is the author's personal journey toward a more observant and more connected Jewish life with both his first and much more with his second and current wife. The reaction of his father (his mother had passed away) is almost humorous, the story of his father putting on a kippah for perhaps the first time (a bit had to believe) is kind of funny.
Most books about the American Jewish experience concentrate on the East European Jews who began to come by the millions in the 1880's and their experience, sort of the Phillip Roth Jews. The earlier, mostly German origin Jews who came in the early 19th century and especially those outside of New York are less described. The author gives their story, especially interesting because it is his story and that of his family. His perspective on his ancestor's approach to Judaism is fascinating, now that he lives are far more observant and connected Jewish life.
This is one of the best Jewish history/memoir books that I have read.
Did Not Finish
June 3, 2026DNFing - 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.
It seems like a lot of people are liking it so it’s probably just me.
July 13, 2026
If I could, I would ask Nicholas Lemann to blurb the memoir I am trying to write now. That’s because, in this book, he does many of the things I hope I can do.
And he does them well.
At one level, this is a multi-generational family history. We get fairly sustained biographies of his great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. That’s not easy to do – trust me, I’m trying something reasonably similar every day – largely because it means squaring the circle of writing about strangers whom you know to be some of the ancestors who may or may not have shaped you.
Fortunately for him, Lemann has a lot of material to work with. His g-g-grandfather came to New Orleans as a largely penniless merchant and, in the right place at the right time, rose as New Orleans’s fortunes rose. Lemann is candid and mournful about the role that slavery played in the economy of the time, and he doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that his family dealt in slaves. At the end of the Civil War, when others in the plantation economy couldn’t see how to persevere without slaves, he developed new ways of growing and processing sugar. He was prominent enough that people wrote about him, and Lemann mines his sources well.
Then, stunningly, he has voluminous journals of the life of his great-grandfather. He’s striking as he writes about that ancestor’s travels in Europe. The family had sent him away so he wouldn’t have to fight in the Civil War – beyond the obvious dangers of combat, his pledging allegiance to the North would have hurt their New Orleans business while his pledging to the South would have disrupted the connections to their Northern suppliers – and he traveled around Jewish Europe. Lemann is poignant in describing the lack of awareness that such a world would be wiped out within the lifetime of the next generation.
Next comes the grandfather who, a devoted friend of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, made himself a New Deal stalwart and early civil rights exponent. There’s a lot of material there as well.
So, there are the broad and consequential lives of those ancestors, and it would have been enough for Lemann just to record them. He has in mind something more, though – the gradual redefining and diminishing of their collective sense of being Jewish.
As he describes it, their German-Jewish experience was different in New Orleans than most American Jews had. German-American Jews of their community believed that they were not a race but a religion. And they further believed that, if their radical Reform Jewry project succeeded, they’d manage to become fully American, no more peculiar to the mainstream than Catholics might be to Methodists.
Spoiler alert – that hasn’t happened. So, if Lemann has two simultaneous goals with his work – one to trace the family as individuals and one to explore its collective relationship to Judaism – he also has a third: his own story of, as he titles this, “returning” to the Jewish tradition his forebears allowed to fade.
It’s to his deep credit that he does so without blame. He is not condescending when he talks of his father’s discomfort with being identified as Jewish, and he does not come across as proselytizing in any way. He’s telling his story and letting it speak for itself.
Near the beginning, he makes a distinction that I want to hang onto. He talks about a different between Jewish-American time/history and Jewish time/history. The one encompasses four or five generations and no more than two centuries. The other stretches across millennia, and it suggests the need to hold onto a faith that gives meaning to such a large historical perspective.
“It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it,” goes the English translation of one of our Jewish prayers. That’s what Lemann is after, and, remarkably, it is simultaneously a tree of life and a family tree.
And he does them well.
At one level, this is a multi-generational family history. We get fairly sustained biographies of his great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. That’s not easy to do – trust me, I’m trying something reasonably similar every day – largely because it means squaring the circle of writing about strangers whom you know to be some of the ancestors who may or may not have shaped you.
Fortunately for him, Lemann has a lot of material to work with. His g-g-grandfather came to New Orleans as a largely penniless merchant and, in the right place at the right time, rose as New Orleans’s fortunes rose. Lemann is candid and mournful about the role that slavery played in the economy of the time, and he doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that his family dealt in slaves. At the end of the Civil War, when others in the plantation economy couldn’t see how to persevere without slaves, he developed new ways of growing and processing sugar. He was prominent enough that people wrote about him, and Lemann mines his sources well.
Then, stunningly, he has voluminous journals of the life of his great-grandfather. He’s striking as he writes about that ancestor’s travels in Europe. The family had sent him away so he wouldn’t have to fight in the Civil War – beyond the obvious dangers of combat, his pledging allegiance to the North would have hurt their New Orleans business while his pledging to the South would have disrupted the connections to their Northern suppliers – and he traveled around Jewish Europe. Lemann is poignant in describing the lack of awareness that such a world would be wiped out within the lifetime of the next generation.
Next comes the grandfather who, a devoted friend of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, made himself a New Deal stalwart and early civil rights exponent. There’s a lot of material there as well.
So, there are the broad and consequential lives of those ancestors, and it would have been enough for Lemann just to record them. He has in mind something more, though – the gradual redefining and diminishing of their collective sense of being Jewish.
As he describes it, their German-Jewish experience was different in New Orleans than most American Jews had. German-American Jews of their community believed that they were not a race but a religion. And they further believed that, if their radical Reform Jewry project succeeded, they’d manage to become fully American, no more peculiar to the mainstream than Catholics might be to Methodists.
Spoiler alert – that hasn’t happened. So, if Lemann has two simultaneous goals with his work – one to trace the family as individuals and one to explore its collective relationship to Judaism – he also has a third: his own story of, as he titles this, “returning” to the Jewish tradition his forebears allowed to fade.
It’s to his deep credit that he does so without blame. He is not condescending when he talks of his father’s discomfort with being identified as Jewish, and he does not come across as proselytizing in any way. He’s telling his story and letting it speak for itself.
Near the beginning, he makes a distinction that I want to hang onto. He talks about a different between Jewish-American time/history and Jewish time/history. The one encompasses four or five generations and no more than two centuries. The other stretches across millennia, and it suggests the need to hold onto a faith that gives meaning to such a large historical perspective.
“It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it,” goes the English translation of one of our Jewish prayers. That’s what Lemann is after, and, remarkably, it is simultaneously a tree of life and a family tree.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
“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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
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.
June 8, 2026
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.
June 14, 2026
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.
May 7, 2026
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.
August 6, 2026
A dense read of Nicholas Lemann retelling his family history through him finding his identity. Very interesting, but I did shift to reading guided by the audiobook about half way through. It was a super cool read telling his familial history, interconnected with German, American, and Jewish history, from the 1800s to the present.
There were a few quotes I underlined as I read, but one on page 121 at the end of Part 1 was really good:
"...being Jewish has a way of pushing itself to the fore: because of how people who aren't Jewish think and act; because of how strongly it imprints itself, unbidden, irresistibly, on our consciousness; because of what it offers, including both extraordinary treasures and a feeling of perpetual unease."
There were a few quotes I underlined as I read, but one on page 121 at the end of Part 1 was really good:
"...being Jewish has a way of pushing itself to the fore: because of how people who aren't Jewish think and act; because of how strongly it imprints itself, unbidden, irresistibly, on our consciousness; because of what it offers, including both extraordinary treasures and a feeling of perpetual unease."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 11, 2026
In Returning, Nick Lemann—whom I knew decades ago in Cambridge, MA, and Washington, D.C.—grapples with questions as old as humankind: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What do I want to pass on to the next generation?
In this deeply researched, brilliantly written family memoir, Nick looks back two centuries to find his footing, drawing inspiration from his Jewish forebears who arrived in America from Germany. His story is a rich gumbo of New Orleans roots, American financial success, New Deal politics, and spiritual searching.
Simply saying "not-to-be-missed" is not a strong enough endorsement. This is a story for every American who loves this country based on what it was and what it can be.
June 13, 2026
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.
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.
June 24, 2026
As a southern Jew raised in Savannah I found this book to be so interesting. My family arrived in the 1850s and witnessed and shared many of the same experiences. However, I think the Jews in Savannah were more “openly” Jewish and accepted than in New Orleans. A friend of mine went to Tulane and married a Jewish girl from New Orleans. He once shared with me that some of the Jews there had Christmas Trees which I thought was so unusual but after reading this book, I realize that it wasn’t so uncommon there.
May 19, 2026
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.
Let’s hope we will build that future.
July 14, 2026
This was a beautiful story of Jewish and southern history combined with a discovery of leading a Jewish life. It also showed the schism between German Jews and the later arrivals from Eastern Europe. I lived in New Orleans from 1976-1979 and always wondered who lived in those big mansions on St. Charles not ever thinking they could be Jewish, let alone German Jews who wanted to be less Jewish to fit in with their neighbors.
August 5, 2026
There were parts of this that felt a bit tedious as they didn't apply to me directly but what I found most interesting was exploring the tension his Jewish family had felt over the years trying to fit in to a culture that didn't accept Jewish life or Jewishness. The different concessions his family made throughout history and how those affected them. Was interesting to me as a non-Jewish person just seeing the same types of tensions (though different in degree) in my own religious life.
May 24, 2026
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.
June 22, 2026
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.
April 26, 2026
A must-read for anyone searching for the Jewish roots and living a Jewish life now.
May 31, 2026
What a towering, moving, profound, thoughtful work this is. Cannot recommend this highly enough, even to other goyim.
June 28, 2026
Profound and fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews