Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Lelyveld's engrossing look back inspires us to reconsider family legacies and the persistent vulnerability of human rights." Booklist
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"[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." New Yorker
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"Generous, evenhanded....Eccentric and a bit self-indulgent, in mellifluous prose." Kirkus Reviews
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"His is the restrained newspaperman's voice of principled detachment: no taking sides, little introspection, narrative plumbed for data and evidence rather than motive or metaphor." Cynthia Ozick, New York Times
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"His account is clear-eyed, curious, scrupulous, forever eager to reach out and touch the little boy's hand that had once been his own..." Andre Aciman, New York Times
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"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
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"Omaha Blues is a beauty of a memoir scrupulous, and beautifully written." Ward Just
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"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
Synopsis
Lelyveld's effort 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.
Synopsis
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."
About the Author
Joseph Lelyvelds 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.