Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop - Hardcover

Lelyveld, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374225907 ISBN 13: 9780374225902

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

Reviews

Although his parents nicknamed him "the memory boy," former New York Times executive editor Lelyveld can't remember how he earned such a moniker. In this memoir, the author reflects on this detail as well as other familial eccentricities as he sorts through his dying father's belongings. He recalls not just his own past, but that of his rabbi father and Shakespearean scholar mother, as well as political events of their time, like the Scottsboro trials and the Zionist movement. With a reporter's skepticism, Lelyveld investigates his personal history and ponders the nature of memory even as he relates the events of his own life. Although the book's title implies a sweep back into his past and then forward again, Lelyveld actually supplies more fragments than a single, continuous loop. He tends to double back, change subjects, introduce characters that aren't seen again and flip between present and past tense even when dwelling primarily on childhood events. The effect is usually charming, producing a jazzy, stream-of-consciousness atmosphere. But occasionally such time travel provokes a kind of literary motion sickness, as Lelyveld veers from adult feelings to childhood events, and ruminations on whether memory is even trustworthy. On the whole, though, readers will appreciate and connect with the way he tries to unravel his past and examine its details almost as they present themselves—as one would for the paper of record. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374225907
• ISBN 13: 9780374225902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240