Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop [Hardcover]

Joseph Lelyveld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From The New Yorker

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (March 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374225907
• ISBN-13: 978-0374225902
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,128,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars american jewish diaspora, April 30, 2005

By 

bill katovsky (san francisco, california USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop (Hardcover)

my confession first, since this book is a quasi-memoir (the author calls it a memory loop, though it reads like a mobious strip of guilt, pain, poignancy, and truth-seeking), i was attracted to this book because joe lelyveld's father was my rabbi growing up in cleveland. i really didn't enjoy going to fairmont temple as a youngster, not on sundays and certainly not twice a week for hebrew school when around 4:30 p.m, once a week, we filed into the chapel, and the rabbi would lead us through the standard prayers. i rarely, rarely, rarely go to temple these days ( six months on a kibbutz in the negev when i was 19 did wonders for my belief in cultural judaism at the expense of religiousity). but this book is a confrontation between memory and loss in the attempt to untangle destiny from fate. the battleground is the uneasy relationship between father and son, arthur and joe, with his mother providing the drama that sets things spinning off-kilter. the pages are thick with loss and regret; there is none of the philip roth's comic shtick that jumps at the reader in his autobiographical writings (or thinly veiled fictional renderings.) i applaud mr. lelyveld for having the courage to confront his past, especially as he must look far back in time, decades, to pry loose shards of recollection. know thyself, socrates counseled. this book satisfies the author's need to know, though it would be foolish to expect a complete and full answer.

so just how close were father and son? not very. towards the end of the book, the son lets fly this awareness: "we seldom quarreled and we were never close." nor did they engage in much shop talk; rabbi lelyvled was one of the most prominent rabbis in america, and his son rose to become the man in charge at the ny times. but they steered clear discussing their jobs or careers. which to me, is, frighteningly pathological. perhaps the need to avoid conflict at all costs was what drove this arrangement, but as a reader, i wanted to know about the schisms that had to exist, especially in matter of political coverage that the times devoted to the arab-israeli saga.

naturally, with an emotionally distant father, joe needed another father figure to project his hopes and desires as he entered his adolescence, and the figure who emerged is a complicated rabbi/communist/friend of his father who occupies the moral center--and about 50 pages--of this slim book. it's here that joe's reportorial skills are in full display as he pieces together the mysterious life of ben goldstein/ben lowell.

as for my own recollection of rabbi lelyvled: I remember the newspaper photo of him in his blood-soaked shirt following a vicious beating by white thugs in the south in the early 60s. I was seven or so when this occured. and i remember his rather stiff and aloof demeanor during religious services. anyway, i was too young to make sense of any of his sermons. but every time he stood in front of the congregation, I would keep picturing the rabbi, with the bandage over his eye and the blood soaked shirt. he achieved a somewhat heroic stature as a result of this constant visualization

this book, alas, by his son, brings the rabbi down to earth. not maliciously, but in a careful, circumspect way, we see a man defined by his son who, in his seventh decade is still trying to define himself as a welter of repressed memories surfaced. one walks away from this sad, sad book hoping to have read these words from rabbi to son, " I love you, son." joe does tell his father that he loves him, but by then, the rabbi is lying in a vegetative state as a result of a brain tumor. the father can't hear the son. or respond to him. now, that's a painful memory loop. memories, after all, are for the living.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional, warm offering, April 23, 2005

By 

Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop (Hardcover)

Joseph Lelyveld's "Omaha Blues", a recollection of his growing up years, is a book that touches all emotions. Having only known the author through books like Seth Mnookin's "Hard News" and his (Lelyveld's) appearances on programs such as Charlie Rose, I felt a certain draw to read "Omaha Blues". I was not disappointed.

Had the term "dysfunctional" been around in the 1940s and 1950s, Lelyveld's family could be described as such. Uprooted every few months it seems, Lelyveld spent much of his childhood with different family members (other than his parents) and with total strangers (the Jensen family in Nebraska). One wonders how this nomadic life can affect the maturity of any child, but he seems, somehow, to have taken much of this in stride. It certainly gave him a foundation for his own independence, to which he alludes.

A large section of the middle of the book is devoted to his boyhood "friend", Ben Goldstein, (aka Ben Lowell, aka George B. Stern) who seems to have served as the author's mentor or avuncular presence. While Lelyveld and Goldstein appeared to have known each other for only a brief few years, the older man certainly played an enormous role in the life of the budding foreign correspondent. That so much of this relationship is left to the imagination of the reader, Lelyveld nonetheless fills in the pieces of how Goldstein was connected to his own family...that story, in itself, is worth the read of "Omaha Blues".

I appreciate the author's candor regarding his own recollections of these formative years. While he was nicknamed "the memory boy", Lelyveld is not above letting us know that his own memory is sometimes very faulty. This admission adds to the charm of the book and allows him to be as human as possible.

"Omaha Blues" is told straight from the author's heart. I highly recommend it to any reader who wishes to explore the depths of his or her own family relationships. Joseph Lelyveld has given us his remembrances in a most affective way.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unexamined area of American history, July 24, 2005

By 

Jeff (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop (Hardcover)

I purchased this book because I enjoyed Lleyveld's work at the New York Times and thought his autobiography would be of interest. It proved to be interesting for other reasons, as well. Firstly, it provides a glimpse of what it life must have been like for rural Jews in early-20th century America. As a native of Alabama, I've wondered how life must have been like for Jews then, and this book certainly answers that question. Also, as a reporter, Mr. Lleyveld is able to research his early years and effectively establish or disprove the validity of his memories. This proves very interesting and he deserves a lot of credit for this. It must have been very difficult to rely on objectively researched clues for the story of his life, instead of his own memories, especially considering that oftentimes his own memories proved false.