From Booklist
Lelyveld is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former executive editor of the New York Times whose intriguing, often traumatic, family history exposes in uncommon ways the nexus between the personal and the political. An accidental memoirist, Lelyveld was impelled to investigate his parents' lives after unearthing, in his ailing father's papers, startling testimony to overlooked aspects of the cold war era. The story of his depressed mother is a study in the confines of traditional domesticity. His rabbi father's varied career sheds light on the Zionist movement, the precarious position of Jews in the Deep South, and power struggles within Jewish organizations. His fractured childhood is a poignant subject, rendered even more resonant by his discovery that a boyhood hero was involved in the civil rights movement, Hollywood, the Communist Party, Soviet espionage, McCarthyism, and the Korean War. Most dramatically, Lelyveld recounts how his father was severely beaten in Mississippi during the "freedom summer," then gave the eulogy for Andrew Goodman, one of the three murdered civil rights workers. Now that this case has been reopened after 40 years, Lelyveld's engrossing look back inspires us to reconsider family legacies and the persistent vulnerability of human rights. Donna Seaman
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Review
"At once controlled and absolutely direct, an astonishing journal of personal discovery that explores--at the exact place where the two intersect--both a powerfully affecting family history and a political history of the most complex kind." --Joan Didion
"Joseph Lelyveld has told a fascinating story--the story of his youth and of his parents' tormented marriage--with an unflinching and very touching honesty that makes this memoir riveting and poignant." --Robert Caro
"Omaha Blues is a beauty of a memoir--scrupulous, and beautifully written." --Ward Just
"In this compact and gracefully written memoir, Joe Lelyveld interrogates the adult mysteries and evasions that circumstanced his young life. His treatment of the effects of passionate political allegiances on personal relationships goes deep. The revised portraits he arrives at, of others and himself, are acute but forgiving. Omaha Blues is a triumph of retrospection. The book will be a classic." --Norman Rush
Book Description
The profoundly moving family history of one of America's greatest newspapermen.
As his father lies dying, Joseph Lelyveld finds himself in the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where Arthur Lelyveld was the celebrated rabbi. Nicknamed "the memory boy" by his parents, the fifty-nine-year-old son begins to revisit the portion of his father's life recorded in letters, newspaper clippings, and mementos stored in a dusty camp trunk. In an excursion into an unsettled and shakily recalled period of his boyhood, Lelyveld uses these artifacts, and the journalistic reporting techniques of his career as an author and editor, to investigate memories that have haunted him in adult life..
With equal measures of candor and tenderness, Lelyveld unravels the tangled story of his father and his mother, a Shakespeare scholar whose passion for independence led her to recoil from her roles as a clergyman's wife and, for a time, as a mother. This reacquired history of his sometimes troubled family becomes the framework for the author's story; in particular, his discovery in early adolescence of the way personal emotions cue political choices, when he is forced to choose sides between his father and his own closest adult friend, a colleague of his father's who is suddenly dismissed for concealing Communist ties.
Lelyveld's offort to recapture his family history takes him on an unforeseen journey past disparate landmarks of the last century, including the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964. His excursion becomes both a meditation on the selectivity and unreliability of memory and a testimony to the possibilities, even late in life, for understanding and healing. As Lelyveld seeks out the truth of his life story, he evokes a remarkable moment in our national story with unforgettable poignancy.
About the Author
Joseph Lelyveld's career at The New York Times spanned nearly four decades and included stints as a correspondent in London, New Delhi, Hong Kong, and Johannesburg. He also served as the paper's foreign editor, managing editor, and, from 1994 to 2001, executive editor. He is the author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1986. He lives in New York.
Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop FROM THE PUBLISHER
As his father lies dying, Joseph Lelyveld finds himself in the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where Arthur Lelyveld was the celebrated rabbi. Nicknamed "the memory boy" by his parents, the fifty-nine-year-old son begins to revisit the portion of his father's life recorded in letters, newspaper clippings, and mementos stored in a dusty camp trunk. In an excursion into an unsettled and shakily recalled period of his boyhood, Lelyveld uses these artifacts, and the journalistic reporting techniques of his career as an author and editor, to investigate memories that have haunted him in adult life..
With equal measures of candor and tenderness, Lelyveld unravels the tangled story of his father and his mother, a Shakespeare scholar whose passion for independence led her to recoil from her roles as a clergyman's wife and, for a time, as a mother. This reacquired history of his sometimes troubled family becomes the framework for the author's story; in particular, his discovery in early adolescence of the way personal emotions cue political choices, when he is forced to choose sides between his father and his own closest adult friend, a colleague of his father's who is suddenly dismissed for concealing Communist ties.
Lelyveld's offort to recapture his family history takes him on an unforeseen journey past disparate landmarks of the last century, including the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964. His excursion becomes both a meditation on the selectivity and unreliability of memory and a testimony to the possibilities, even late in life, for understanding and healing. As Lelyveld seeks outthe truth of his life story, he evokes a remarkable moment in our national story with unforgettable poignancy.
FROM THE CRITICS
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.
Library Journal
Long a force at the New York Times, Lelyveld uses his journalist skills to limn his rabbi father's life. A nice complement to Freedman's Who She Was (previewed above). Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Generous, evenhanded, somewhat mistitled memoir of growing up first in Omaha, then in NYC, with a peripatetic rabbi father and a disappearing mother. With the death of his father, and nearing the end of his own sixth decade, Pulitzer-winning Lelyveld, the retired New York Times editor (How Race Is Lived in America, 2001, etc.), reflects on the dynamics of his parents' marriage, which sparked when they were students at Columbia University, took them to Ohio, then Omaha, where his father led a congregation, then back to New York when his glamorous mother grew weary of being the wife of a midwestern Zionist rabbi and deserted her husband and two sons (then a third, by another man) to finish doctoral work in dramatic literature at Columbia. By third grade, Lelyveld had "washed up" at PS 165 on the Upper West Side, an immigrant from Omaha by way of Brooklyn, having recognized that he had "inexplicably become a burden" to his parents. Yet he is never bitter here; rather, he devotes many of his pages to a protege of his father's, also a rabbi, Benjamin Goldstein, a.k.a. Ben Lowell, who was the closest adult friend of Lelyveld's boyhood, and whose shadowy life he learns about many years later, when he receives files from the FBI on a Freedom of Information request. Ben was the buddy who took Lelyveld to Columbia football games because his father, the head of the Hillel Foundation, was too busy traveling; in fact, Ben had an early career as a Communist organizer; led a congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, that subsequently ousted him when he couldn't restrain his support for the scandalous Scottsboro boys' cause; worked in agitprop in Hollywood; and, by 1950, got branded a "pinko rabbi" for hisdefense of pro-Communist front organizations. Lelyveld's exploration of Ben's mysterious life allows him to delve into issues dear to his own heart, yet he skirts the abandonment by his mother, whom he cannot summon anger against. Eccentric and a bit self-indulgent, in mellifluous prose.
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