Open Book / Open Mind, Nicholas Lemann, "Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries"

Nicholas Lemann will talk about about his new starkly honest family history, "Returning," in which he traces his Jewish Southern ancestors from Louisiana to German and explores their past as plantation owners (and enslavers) as well as their indifference to fellow Jews.

A three–century family drama, in which he traces the Lemanns from their humble beginnings in Germany to the nineteenth–century American South, where they became Jewish plantation owners and aspirants to New Orleans society. Yet Lemann began chafing against the South’s strict racial hierarchy and his relatives’ eagerness to be accepted in an anti–Semitic environment, including a deliberate blindness to the plight of desperate European Jews. Returning follows the narrator as he rejects this assimilated world and embraces the rites of Judaism."—Liveright/Norton

Doors open at 6 p.m. The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book sales and signing with Watchung Booksellers.

Open Book / Open Mind is sponsored by Montclair Public Library Foundation, Watchung Booksellers, Anonymous, David and Mary Lee Jones, and our individual Underwriters. We are also grateful for the generous support of our in-kind sponsors, First Congregational Church of Montclair, The George, and Amanti Vino. To support Open Book / Open Mind and other library programs, clickhereto donate.