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The profoundly moving family history of one of America's greatest newspapermen.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April 2005
240 pages
ISBN: 0374225907
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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