Returning, p.38
Returning, page 38
When we visited Germany and saw the expensive gravestone that Jacob Lemann, as a wealthy middle-aged man, had built for his long-dead father, Judith spotted a pair of outstretched hands engraved at the top of the stone. “You’re a Cohen!” she said—the hands, as she knew and I didn’t, mean that you belong to the ancient hereditary class of priests, supposedly the descendants of Moses’s brother Aaron, who still have a special prestige in observant communities.
“Does that mean you love me more than you did before?” I asked her, half kidding, but only half.
“Of course it does!”
I consulted my cousin Hanan, the one whose father had converted from Judaism to become a Quaker, and who is now an Orthodox Israeli with dozens of grandchildren. He told me that a Cohen loses his priestly status if he marries a non-Jewish woman, even if she converts, so we are actually former Cohens. We lost our membership when Jacob married Marie—oh well. A couple of years before our trip to Germany, Judith traveled all over Eastern Europe with her sister and one of her cousins to learn what they could about their family’s history. There they encountered no signs of intermarriage or assimilation, and no impressive gravestones either—instead, mostly, unmarked places out in the woods where people they came from, after uniformed thugs had removed them from their homes at gunpoint, taken everything they had, and loaded them into wagons, had been lined up and shot, if they hadn’t had the foresight to move to America or to Israel. The eternal questions about Jewish life in the Diaspora can’t ever be satisfactorily answered. We’ll survive, though we will never sit comfortably in the world. But the tradition can’t ever, or maybe can’t ever be allowed to, disappear.
We’d had three deaths in four years—Judith’s parents’ and then Father’s. After the mourning, we went back to the routines of our lives, now as the older generation of the family. Mundaneness is comforting. For us, some of it was ordinary mundaneness and some of it was Jewish mundaneness. Would we host both Passover seders, or just one? Whom would we invite, and what could we ask the guests to bring? How many days ahead of time should we begin the project of boiling the silverware, eliminating everything non-kosher from the house, and stowing our regular dishes away? After Passover, there was a controversy in the minyan that had to be resolved. There were weddings, bar mitzvahs, other people’s shivas, the endless procession of Sabbath dinners. There were starchy, sweet, comfortable Kiddush lunches, with babkas, kugel, herring, schnapps. There were lectures, study sessions, museum exhibitions.
One day during this period of mourning and readjustment, I visited Donaldsonville. When Father would take me to visit when I was a boy, we’d go to the family store, B. Lemann & Brother, and be shown, in addition to the merchandise for sale, exotic nineteenth-century items left over from the store’s early days. Father’s cousin Bubs would take us up to the attic to write our names on a whitewashed brick wall with a thick pencil. What could possibly be more permanent? But it wasn’t. After 150 years, the store went out of business. The family tried to operate it as a museum of small-town life in the nineteenth century, but not many visitors turned up. Then, for years, the building stood empty, a constant source of worry to my country cousins. Finally there was good news: a developer from New Orleans, who specializes in preserving historic properties, had bought the store. He was going to convert it into an apartment house, with the help of a subsidy from the state. It’s now called Lemann Art Lofts, more as a tribute to the terms of the subsidy than to the likelihood of Donaldsonville’s reemerging as a mecca for bohemians.
When I visited, DeeDee DiBenedetto, my cousin Peter’s partner and the chatelaine of Palo Alto plantation, arranged to take me to meet the developer who had saved the store. It was generous of DeeDee to take the time: she’d been up most of the previous night in connection with her work as a private eye, sitting in her car in the parking lot of a motel, because she was working a matrimonial case. We met at Palo Alto. DeeDee, a powerful presence who has a big mane of jet-black hair and animated, heavily mascara’ed eyes, greeted me with an enfolding hug. We drove across the Mississippi River on the Sunshine Bridge—named after a familiar country song whose popularity a singer named Jimmie Davis rode to the governorship of Louisiana—and then to Houmas House, the site of what was once the largest sugarcane plantation in the United States. It was a short trip, less than twenty miles.
The cornice of the Lemann store in Donaldsonville, photographed during the years after it had gone out of business. Carol M. Highsmith
Houmas House presents itself as a full-blown tourist attraction, with a big sign welcoming visitors, three restaurants, a museum, an amphitheater, and an inn. There are splashing fountains, ponds, wandering ducks and geese, colored lights playing across the plantation house at night. At the peak of its life as a working plantation, its owner, John Burnside, controlled six thousand acres of land, made productive for him through the labor of more than nine hundred enslaved Black people. William Howard Russell, the correspondent from The Times of London who had been dispatched to the United States to cover the Civil War, visited the plantation in 1861. He reported that the enslaved were not permitted to learn to read or write, or even to go to church. They lived in cabins with no windows.
DeeDee and I had a long lunch with the owner of Houmas House, Kevin Kelly, at the most elegant of Houmas House’s restaurants. Kelly is a big, talkative man, florid faced, who is keenly aware of the charges of his critics—he celebrates plantation slavery, he has Disneyfied Houmas House—and indignantly rejects them. We sat at a dark wooden table laid with graceful china on a crisp white tablecloth, and ordered heavy, rich Southern dishes. Then we got into an elongated golf cart and toured the grounds. Kelly knows his market. He has designed the premises as a restoration of what many white Southerners—even now, and certainly when I was growing up—prefer to think of as a vanished past of wealth and ease. As its website puts it, Houmas House on the eve of the Civil War “contained over twelve thousand acres of the finest quality of cultivable land . . . and was without exception, the finest property possessed by a single proprietor in America.”
Kelly lives in the main plantation house himself, as John Burnside and the other previous owners did. Anything that would evoke the South’s old racial order in a positive way attracts his interest. He has made a standing offer of one million dollars to the city of New Orleans to sell him the statues of three leading Confederates—Robert E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis—that it took down a few years ago, so he can house them at Houmas House. Just about everything else in New Orleans that has been removed from a public place for being racially offensive, he has acquired and put on display in his museum. One section of his museum is devoted entirely to paintings of Black people eating watermelons. And nearby is an exhibit about country general stores in the Old South, where all the artifacts I used to see on my childhood visits to B. Lemann & Brother, which came into Kelly’s possession when he bought the building, are on display. His are the hands into what we once had have passed, so that they can help vivify a wishful version of life in the Old South.
Just as it used to be inconceivable to me that Quercus would one day be somebody else’s house, that B. Lemann & Brother would be an apartment building, and that its venerable contents would wind up in a museum celebrating the South’s old racial order, I wouldn’t have imagined that one day I would feel more Jewish than Southern. But now I do. It’s the ancestral seat that has lasted. My adolescent task of finding a usable Southern past has come to feel insuperably difficult, in light of what the explorations and investigations of many people besides me have turned up. Jack Burden took me a crucial distance—I learned that you can’t sit easily in the world, that nothing is ever simple, that there’s always something—but no further. Through the generations, I came to the view that being Jewish has taken my family further than being Southern did. It feels as if there is more to learn, a more profound moral code, more to build a life around, in the Jewish tradition. It isn’t the way I was raised, but over the years it has become comfortable. It’s what I’m used to. Sometimes it’s more than comfortable—it’s an opening into something sublime.
One reason Judith doesn’t go to Saturday morning services as regularly as I do is that she wants more from them, though she is rarely able to say exactly what that is—some sort of transcendence she can’t locate. I’m less well schooled than she is, so I don’t notice what’s lacking as keenly. Or maybe it’s that I haven’t experienced what’s possible as often as she has. All the Jewish practices carry with them a hope, a longing, for something that only rarely is realized. A synecdoche for this is sex, which is on the list of commanded activities on the Sabbath. As with all the other rules, nothing happens to you if you ignore the commandment, or if you obey it merely dutifully. But there’s always the possibility of something more. We know from the very beginning of the Book of Genesis that men and women are destined to find it difficult to lie together naked and unashamed—but sometimes we can. In the Song of Songs, the rare book in the Hebrew Bible that doesn’t mention God, your ointments are fragrant, sweetness drops from your lips, honey and milk are under your tongue.
I remember being with Judith on a Sabbath afternoon once in the early days. She was warm, close, solid. I felt that something long locked away, something glorious, had been opened up for me. Somehow whatever barriers that usually were there for me—for both of us, really—had been breached. We were comfortable, with no need for emotional protection, and I had to wonder whether the Jewish life we had begun to live together, with its enveloping sense of trust and a common purpose, was part of the reason. Had I come home, finally—to my real home, not one of a lifelong series of hoped-for homes? I don’t know. You can’t ever really know the answer to that kind of question. But I remember thinking: I have never felt this close to another person.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to my late cousin Bernard Lemann (1905–2000), a professor at Tulane University’s architecture school and an early leader of the architectural preservation movement in New Orleans. In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Bernard realized that the copious papers and records kept at B. Lemann & Brother, the family store in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, had real historical value. He began a project of collecting these and other family papers and donating them to Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection. He also wrote a privately published book, The Lemann Family of Louisiana (1965). It’s this material that served as the foundation for my research for this book.
Brad Snyder, a law professor at Georgetown and a biographer of Felix Frankfurter, persuaded my father, Thomas Lemann, to give him access to the extensive, decades-long private correspondence between Frankfurter and my grandfather, Monte M. Lemann. After reading this material, Snyder urged me to have it transferred to a research library because of its historical importance. My family and I took his advice, for which we are grateful, and now the Louisiana Research Collection has Monte Lemann’s papers. Leon Miller, the center’s director, made the decision to accept the papers and then supervised the project of organizing them and making them available to the public—including me, for the research for this book. He and the collection’s excellent staff, especially Lori Schexnayder, have my thanks for everything they have done to make this book possible.
There is another, smaller collection of Lemann family papers at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. Also at the American Jewish Archives are the extensive papers of my relative by marriage Lazard Kahn (1850–1928); the papers of another relative by marriage, Julian Feibelman (1897–1980), the long-serving rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans; the papers of Max Heller (1860–1929), a previous long-serving rabbi at Temple Sinai; and the papers of the American Council for Judaism. Gary Zola, the archives’ director, and, especially, Dana Herman, the director of research and collections there, were superbly and copiously helpful.
Karen Franklin, the director of family research at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, organized my trip to Germany to learn about my family’s life there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I owe great thanks not only to her, but also to two local historians she arranged for me to work with, Wolfgang Fritzsche in Mainz and Stefan Mossel in Essenheim. Without the three of them, I surely would have been unable to pierce the barrier that separates most American descendants of immigrants from any details about their families’ long-ago lives in the old country.
In the office of the Ascension Parish Clerk of Court in Gonzales, Louisiana, Brett Landry, the deputy clerk, provided a great deal of help in guiding me through my family’s old records in the clerk’s offices there and in Donaldsonville. These records can be daunting: most are handwritten, and many are in French. I could never have found what I needed in them unaided. Also in Donaldsonville, my cousin Peter Lemann and his partner, DeeDee DiBenedetto, shared with me family materials that hadn’t been deposited in the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane. In New Orleans, Milly Heller, great-granddaughter of Rabbi Max Heller, shared some of her family’s private papers with me. My cousin Geoffrey Goldberg conducted a long oral history interview with his grandmother, Lillian Hyman Florsheim, that gives a detailed picture of one branch of my family’s life in New Orleans in the early twentieth century. Another cousin, Barbara London Almario, has turned up difficult-to-find details about the history of my mother’s family.
At Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, Heather Oswald helped me find the reports on Lemann family enterprises, going back to the 1840s, in the library’s collection of the credit reports produced by R. G. Dun and Company, the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet. Leslie Lovett, a high school history teacher in Houston, gave me a copy of her excellent Tulane undergraduate thesis on Jacob Lemann, from 1990.
Several of my fellow members of Minyan M’at, in New York—people far more knowledgeable than me about various aspects of Jewish studies—gave me indispensable advice about this project. They include Barry Holtz, David Roskies, Nancy Sinkoff, Daniel Nevins, and Carol Ingall. In particular, Nancy Sinkoff introduced me to Nina Warnke, a translator who helped me understand old family documents written in German or rendered in the Hebrew alphabet; Daniel Nevins introduced me to Rabbi Roderick Young, of Norfolk, England, who trained me for the sections of the book that entail scriptural interpretation; and Carol Ingall, through her research on the Isaacs family of New York, gave me materials about my great-grandfather, another Bernard Lemann, who was a close friend of the Isaacs family.
In the course of doing research, I got helpful and generous advice from a number of experts on various aspects of the story I tell in this book. I’ll thank them individually here: Joy Banner (the Descendants Project), Mark Baumann (Southern Jewish Historical Society), Tobias Brinkmann (Pennsylvania State University), Michael Cohen (Tulane University), James French (James Madison’s Montpelier), Richard Kilbourne (independent scholar), James Oakes (City University of New York Graduate Center), Josh Parshall (independent scholar), Lawrence N. Powell (Tulane University), Shari Rabin (Oberlin College), Stuart Rockoff (Mississippi Humanities Council), Caitlin Rosenthal (University of California, Berkeley), Adam Rothman (Georgetown University), Marina Rustow (Princeton University), Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis University), Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary), and Jacob Morrow Spitzer (Yale University).
A number of colleagues and friends agreed to read and suggest improvements to early versions of the manuscript. This is a time-consuming task, and I am profoundly grateful to them for their help, which wound up improving the book greatly. They are Marie Brenner, Faith Childs, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Steven Hahn, Claire Hoffman, Nancy Sinkoff, and Leon Wieseltier.
The work I’ve been doing for all these years is highly collaborative—it’s far closer to putting on a play or playing in a band than self-exiling to a garret. Because it’s nonfiction, the underlying material, and the people who help you find and understand it, are essential partners. So are those who help turn thoughts into words and then into a book. I have been working with the same agent, Amanda Urban, for my whole adult life; in general, and in the case of this project, she has been consummately wise, professional, and devoted. This is the first time I have worked with Robert Weil, my editor at Liveright. He is a master at what he does. I don’t think there is a paragraph in this book that he didn’t urge me to improve—and doing what he suggested did improve it. His close, detailed, patient attention through several drafts helped me to understand how to say what was closest to my heart, in language that was less distanced and journalistic than what I am used to writing. Also at Liveright, Peter Miller, the director of publicity; Steven Pace, the director of sales; Trent Duffy, the copyeditor; and Luke Swann, Robert Weil’s assistant, were all supremely encouraging and impressively good at what they do. Kathleen Karcher, who handled permissions, was also very helpful.
I come from a large, close extended family. It can’t have been entirely easy for my relatives to have known for these past few years that I’ve been working on a family history whose result would inevitably be as complicated as honest family histories always are. I appreciate their patience, support, and trust. My particular debt to my wife, Judith Shulevitz, will be obvious to anyone who reads this book. In any number of ways, this project simply would not have been possible without her.
A Note on Sources
This is a work of nonfiction, but it is not a work of academic scholarship. Here I will offer a rough guide to my source material, not a specific citation for everything in the book.
It will be obvious to readers that some of the primary material here comes from my own memories. Some of it is in boxes of family materials, mainly from my parents, that I have at home. But a good deal, especially of the older material, is publicly available in library manuscript collections—mainly the Louisiana Research Collection, at Tulane University in New Orleans, and the American Jewish Archives, in Cincinnati. The pertinent collections at Tulane are the Lemann Family Papers (LaRC-168) and the Monte Lemann Papers (LaRC-1124). Some additional material I used is in the Edgar B. Stern Papers (LaRC-235) and the Robert G. Polack Papers (LaRC-231). At the American Jewish Archives, there is a small collection of Lemann Family Papers (MS-383), and more substantial collections of the papers of my relatives by marriage Lazard Kahn (MS-174) and Julian Beck Feibelman (MS-94). I also consulted the papers of the American Council for Judaism (MS-17). At Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, I read the R. G. Dun & Company credit reports for my family’s businesses in nineteenth-century Louisiana.
