Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, we hear from veteran journalist Nicholas Lemann, whose new book, “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries,” traces his family’s extraordinary journey as Jews navigating the assimilationist culture of the 19th-century American South. Today, he reflects on “Remember Me to God,” a little-known 1957 novel that helped him understand why his parents sought to minimize their Jewish identity—and why, years later, he chose to reclaim it.
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Antisemitism comes in many varieties, but it may be useful to divide it into two broad categories: populist and elite. Populist antisemitism is loud, conspiratorial, and regularly violent. Elite antisemitism, which is the variety I have regularly encountered, is genteel, private, and exclusionary. It takes place in rooms with closed doors, where, probably, it is expressed in euphemisms, not direct statements. Being proximate to populist antisemitism generates fear. Being proximate to elite antisemitism generates suspicion, suppressed anger, self-doubt.
I have spent the last several years investigating my family’s history, going back five generations—something I was able to do because the Lemanns have been living in Louisiana for the past 190 years and have been compulsive record keepers. My great-great-grandfather came to New Orleans, alone, from the village of Essenheim, Germany, started out as a peddler, and wound up as the prosperous owner of a small-town dry goods store and a string of sugarcane plantations during the post–Civil War era. During my childhood, none of this seemed like a long-ago past; I regularly visited these establishments.
But not everything I wanted to know was in my family’s papers. In particular, I wanted to understand why my parents, both born in 1926, were as adults so eager to play down their Jewishness, as if that were the price of full acceptance. Having come to maturity at the dawn of what was supposed to be an era of multicultural tolerance and ethnic pride, shouldn’t they have felt free to embrace being Jewish, as the generations of our family preceding them had been?
