Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop

In the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where his father, Arthur, was a celebrated rabbi, Joseph Lelyveld finds a musty trunk of souvenirs. Applying his award-winning investigative skills, as both a newspaperman and author, Lelyveld uses his father's letters and mementos to rediscover his shakily remembered childhood, and his parent's unhappy marriage. Lelyveld's journey through personal history unexpectedly touches landmarks of the past century—the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964—and, in the words of Joan Didion, "this astonishing journal of personal discovery" combines "both a powerfully affecting family history and a political history of the most complex kind."

In the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where his father, Arthur, was a celebrated rabbi, Joseph Lelyveld finds a musty trunk of souvenirs. Applying his award-winning investigative skills, as both a newspaperman and author, Lelyveld uses his father's letters and mementos to rediscover his shakily remembered childhood, and his parent's unhappy marriage. Lelyveld's journey through personal history unexpectedly touches landmarks of the past century—the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964—and, in the words of Joan Didion, "this astonishing journal of personal discovery" combines "both a powerfully affecting family history and a political history of the most complex kind."

The New Yorker

It is not the habit of newspapermen, even those as accomplished as Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the Times, to write memoirs of the heart. The usual mode is wry, crackling nostalgia (Mencken and Dreiser) or institutional accounting (Arthur Gelb, Max Frankel). At the Times, Lelyveld was known as a brilliant yet shy master of the newsroom, but here he is after something nakedly personal—the secrets of his warring and troubled parents and his own injured youth. At the heart of the story is a misaligned Midwestern marriage—a literary mother and a political father, who was one of the most prominent Reform rabbis in the country. Lelyveld goes about his project of retrieval bravely, with the industry, the scrupulousness, and the ruthlessness of a lifetime’s reportorial discipline. The result is a book that does not care to charm, and does not; rather, it arrives at redemption and forgiveness through the meticulous act of finding out, and recording, the truth.

Joseph Lelyveld's career at The New York Times spanned nearly four decades. He served as the paper's foreign editor, managing editor, and executive editor. He is the author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, which won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1986. He lives in New York.