You Must Remember This

By MICHAEL KRESS

OMAHA BLUES
A Memory Loop
By Jospeh Lelyveld
240 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $22.

We Jews know a thing or two about memory. The Torah admonishes us again and again to remember; remember that you were slaves in Egypt, remember the widows and orphans, remember what Amalek did to you when you left Egypt. Our holidays are imbued with memory, of the events they commemorate—redemption, revelation, wanderings—and the ways they were celebrated in the past, sacrifices and pilgrimages. And, of course, we remember the six million who died in the Holocaust, a memory still fresh from wounds still healing.

And so, Joseph Lelyveld, a longtime New York Times writer and editor, sets out to write his memoir with a reporter's inquisitiveness and attention to detail and a Jew's respect for memory. The result, Omaha Blues, is what he calls a "memory loop." Rather than a strictly linear remembering of his life, he toggles back and forth between his memories and the facts he finds in his research. He discovers the truth behind the now-clichéd Faulkner quote, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past."

Unlike too many memoirists of today, Lelyveld has lived a colorful and fascinating life, and Omaha Blues doesn't even get to most of his Times career. This book focuses primarily on Lelyveld's childhood, his relationship with his parents, and their relationship with each other. But he is able to mingle his personal story with the broader themes of history. That's because Lelyveld lived the rare life that was intertwined quite literally with major historical tides.  His father, a well-known Reform rabbi, was a spokesman for Zionism just as American Jews were debating—and, gradually, embracing—the idea of a Jewish state. He later became heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, and was beaten up in Mississippi for it. In between those two periods, the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s make an appearance, directly touching young Joseph's life by claiming a victim you won't hear about in Hollywood or the history books: Ben, a mysterious left-wing colleague of Rabbi Lelyveld, who befriended young Joseph and became a surrogate father-figure to him, lost his job—and disappeared from Joseph's life—because of his alleged Communist sympathies, in a case that went as high up as J. Edgar Hoover's office.

But it is the personal story that compels this narrative, interesting as the historical backdrop is. Joseph's childhood was a lonely one. His mother was emotionally unstable, spending time in hospitals following suicide attempts and more than once leaving her family to pursue happiness and her career in New York. His father, especially once he left synagogue life and became head of Hillel, the campus Jewish organization (a move in part so he could live in New York to be with his wife), was on the road a lot, often for months at a time, talking up support for Zionism. Joseph was left with relatives, dumped in summer camp, and at one point, sent to live for a summer on a farm with a Seventh-Day Adventist family.

Despite the pain of his past, Lelyveld the adult, now retired from the Times, sets out to relive his childhood by doing what reporters do: Speaking with people from his history or their surviving family members, examining documents, retracing steps. 

The results are at times unsettling. Memories don't match the irrefutable facts he finds in long-lost personal correspondence and institutional paperwork. Timelines are different, details have changed, complexities have emerged. Lelyveld embraces the new truths he discovers, and works to re-adjust his internalized history. This is most painful when it involves what was a vivid memory of his father dealing with the aftermath of Ben's firing from Hillel.

But, just as unsettling in their own way, Lelyveld's findings more often validate his memories and provide a sort of emotional release—that moment of awareness where he realizes his memories have not over-dramatized the traumas of his past and that any self-blame for his childhood feelings is misplaced. Even before embarking on this memory loop, Lelyveld writes, he realized he "didn't need to dismiss all my happy memories just because the context had proved to be a good deal more complicated than I'd allowed myself to imagine when I was growing up, or later." His pain was real, and the happy times that peeked through the loneliness were just as real. It is precisely this journey that allows him to fully embrace and internalize this realization.

Yes, we Jews know much about memory's loop-the-loops. Our seemingly endless cycle of displacement and migration, homelessness and hopefulness, has made us into a people of memory, or a people of the memory loop. And those of us who embrace both tradition and modernity also know, intuitively, what Lelyveld, in my mind, does not seem to understand: that history and memory are very different realms. The former engages "just the facts" with the scrupulousness of a journalist or scholar. The latter is by definition subjective and personal; it molds us into who we are as people, or as a people, and has a deep impact on our beings and our actions, regardless of what the historical facts may say. Did the Exodus happen? What took place at Sinai? The answers are different for history and memory, and it is the memory part that is of primary important to us. Scholars may or may not ever find definitive proof that either of these events happened, but we Jews, in our Jewish memory, are shaped by them nonetheless, just as Lelyveld is shaped more by the memories than by the facts he discovered in his memory loop.