Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries

New Yorker staff writer Lemann (High Admissions) offers a personal take on the history of Jews in America in this powerful family portrait. He initially focuses on his great-great-grandfather Jacob, who was part of a “distinct movement” of German Jews in the early-to-mid-1800s who left the Rhine Valley for New Orleans. Challenging the downtrodden immigrant stereotype, Lemann charts Jacob’s rise from making small-scale loans to opening a dry goods store in Donaldsville, La., where he soon owned land. Yet in researching his family’s past, Lemann learned that “among the assets Jacob bought and sold... were enslaved people,” which helped the family amass a fortune that enabled subsequent generations to attend Harvard Law School even as they worked to conceal their Jewish identity. More recently, as Lemann sought out Judaism “not just as a surface cultural style or as a set of political positions but as something profound,” he became “actively religious” and embraced Jewish life through synagogue attendance and a 2005 visit to Israel. In noting how he “had gone from feeling uncomfortable in the Jewish world to feeling more comfortable in the Jewish world than I did outside it,” he offers an unabashedly emotional account of finding faith. It’s a stirring saga. Agent: Amanda Urban, CAA. (Mar.)