Returning

A Search for Home Across Three Centuries

De: Nicholas Lemann

Narrado por: Nicholas Lemann

Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive, Returning emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time.

Nicholas Lemann grew up thinking he wanted to be Jack Burden, the ever-curious reporter-historian in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men who gets drawn into a web of southern intrigue. Like his fictional mentor, Lemann pulls us mesmerizingly into 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. Through its nuanced combination of biography and philosophy, Returning, with its heartrending portraits of generations of family members, becomes one of the most memorable statements about Jewish history in the twenty-first century.

©2026 Nicholas Lemann (P)2026 Recorded Books

One man’s personal journey into Judaism ✡️

Some redundancy and repetition that read as sloppy editing. Heavy bias toward happiness being found nearly exclusively in fundamentalism, in religion, business, social and political life.

Fabulous, Sweeping, Moving

I loved "Returning" and think it is probably my favorite family memoir of all time, and my favorite book of the past decade. Nicholas Lemann is a beautiful writer and captures 19th century New Orleans and the South as a whole so well and with a balanced critical perspective. He details the 3 generations preceding his, starting with his great great grandfather who moved from Germany to New Orleans in the 1830's and started out as a peddler. Through the generations, society became such that it was easier for his parents to practice a "deracinated" version of very diluted Judaism to fit in with their elite, cossetted neighbors. I was there every step of the way because he is a magnificent storyteller and renders his family members as relatable and flawed. He clearly did a ton of archival and other research to bring this book to fruition. Not only was I entertained, I learned so much about the history of the South, of Jewish American immigration, and of Jewish attempts to fit into what society wanted of them (but has not succeeded) , bringing us to present-day questions about Jewish identity that have become even more salient. Thank you for a magnificent listen!