Chapter 212: All Happy Families…

To borrow from the late and legendary sports writer Red Smith’s lament on being a writer: writing about families is easy…you just open a vein and bleed.

Or your loved ones do.

Or you worry they will.

Or you wait. And wait.

There is no story more familiar and fraught than the one that begins with the decision to excavate the pasts of those with whom you are closest, or of those long gone who were close to those you love most.

Otherwise brave writers have told me that they planned to stall until their parents were gone on before embarking on telling their stories. I empathize; I am only now able to write about my family knowing that my parents and grandparents will never read what I have to say about them. And what I’m saying is not half bad.

That is not to say that perils vanish once the characters have passed away. After a colleague of my wife wrote a book that took his parents to task for their indifferent-to-the-point-of-callousness childrearing, one of his brothers demanded to know how he could dare to criticize their late mom and dad. If you don’t like it, the colleague told his brother – and here I quote – “write your own fucking book.”

Yet we cannot help ourselves. The stories of our families offer so much that can tell us about ourselves, in ways that few other stories can. So time and again, we ascend to the metaphorical (and occasionally literal) attic, and begin sifting through letters, keepsakes, photographs (“grandma looks so young”), postcards (”I had no idea they ever went to Death Valley…”) theater programs, train tickets – in short the detritus of lives that might hold the key to insight and illumination. If you ever want to go down the Mother of All Reportorial Rabbits Holes enter the names of relatives into Ancestry.com‘s data base. See you in a month. Or two when you’ll emerge holding printouts of Ellis Island Disembarkation cards and high school class photos from 1934.

Family stories are at their best and most resonant beyond friends and family, however, when they transcend the particulars of one clan’s history, and use that story for a larger, more ambitious purpose. That is what my friend and colleague Nicholas Lemann has done with his terrific new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.

Nick tells his forebears’ story, following their journey from Germany to America, where they settled and prospered in New Orleans. There they became core members of a small and enduring Jewish community – one that by the time Nick was born had succeeded at becoming an all-but-accepted part of New Orleans society. All but.

Much as the Lemanns worked at assimilating - even as they maintained their faith - they remained, as Jews, outsiders. No matter that his grandfather was on close terms with such powerful men as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Nick grew up aware of his Jewishness, this despite his father marking Thanksgiving as the most important day on the Jewish calendar. I, who grew up in an insular and virtually all Jewish corner of Brooklyn cannot hear that story without shaking my head in bafflement. Not Yom Kippur? Or even Rosh Hashana? Really?

Nick, however, grew spiritually curious and restless, and began learning more about his faith and how his long-deceased relatives lived theirs.

Nick concludes his book with an image that distills, in a loving embrace of his wife, both the head and the heart of his journey. There was nothing easy on this journey, and yet here is Nick, at its end, having arrived home, at last.

I asked Nick about finding and telling what can be the most difficult of stories – the one closest to us.

MS-You’ve gone back generations in finding your family’s story, to people who live primarily through archival material. Yet I wonder how much harder that journey gets as you come closer to the present, and people you have known and loved?

NL-I chose to become a journalist in part to avoid the characteristic difficulties novelists and memoirists have in publishing uncomfortable truths about their own families and communities. So, yes, it gets harder. That may be one reason why I didn’t take on this project until I was much older. Having said that, so far, the level of post-publication discord has been blessedly low.

MS-While many writers consider family histories, how essential is it to have a powerful, vexing question to set the journey in motion? If so, what question animated your search?

NL-If there’s a question, I guess it would be a very big one: What is the essence of Jewish identity, at least for me? That was pertinent because the version of Jewish identity I was raised on was not sustainable, and not just for me. It’s also the case that, in a purely journalistic sense, I was sitting on a big story, which is an extensive and unusually detailed archive of family materials, stretching across five generations and three centuries. It began to seem perverse that I wasn’t exploring it.

MS-Your book concludes in a sublime moment of contentment, with family and faith connected in your marriage. Did you see that ending as a beacon as you reported? Or was it a while in taking shape?

NL-The way I work entails not very much of the fabled terror of the blank page, because I do a lot of research and while I’m doing it, I’m mapping out what’s going to be in the final product, in exact order. So by the time I began writing, I had this in mind as to what the ending would be. Everything in the book, in a sense, points toward that.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.