A son reconciles with his parents’ failings

As Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld was fading away in a Cleveland hospice, his son gripped the older man’s hand, reflecting on the “paradox of this unfailingly loving father who was almost as consistently beyond reach.” It would be years before those reflections propelled veteran New York Times foreign correspondent and editor Joseph Lelyveld to explore things he “only half understood or never grasped at all while they were happening” in his boyhood.

While the rabbi lay dying, a family friend led Lelyveld to a battered trunk stored in the basement of his father’s Cleveland synagogue. When Joseph discovered an archive of family memorabilia inside, his first response “wasn’t at that moment Proustian. It was suffocating.” Six years passed before he re-opened the trunk and, bringing his formidable investigative skills to bear, released the genie of memory in “Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop.”

Lelyveld’s original intention was to chronicle the murky life of Ben Lowell, born Benjamin Goldstein, a rabbi friend of his father’s who had “drifted with the left,” and whom Arthur Lelyveld fired from the Hillel Foundation for speeches that toed the Communist line. In revisiting that rift, Joseph Lelyveld discovers a fascinating social history encompassing the Scottsboro trials in Alabama and the Hollywood blacklist. But this part has less emotional impact than the rest of the book. Thicker scar tissue covers Lelyveld’s relationship to his parents, their relationship to each other, and the way their story played out in the post-war, pre-feminist era. His courage to summon and penetrate these painful memories yields a resonant quotient of self-knowledge.

His mother, Toby Bookholtz Lelyveld, was an attractive, ambitious, obsessive woman who found life as a rabbi’s wife -- first in Omaha, then in Cleveland -- “less fulfilling than she had imagined.” A former actress, she longed to be recognized in her own right, and her “restless imagination fastened on a destiny of her own” as a Shakespeare scholar. Reading the letters in the trunk, Lelyveld was startled to find, in his mother’s own words, validation of his recurring memory of being abandoned as a child. “[S]he had, in truth begun to find me unbearable the summer after I turned five.”

In the summer of 1943, while his mother pursued graduate studies in New York and his father crisscrossed the country on behalf of peace and Zionism, 6-year-old Joseph was sent for “safekeeping” to a family of Seventh Day Adventists on a farm in Tekamah, Neb. The boy was clueless as to why he’d been banished, or why, during another separation, he went months without seeing his parents while living with his grandparents. “How would you explain to a seven-year-old that his mother has taken an existential decision?”

Over the years, he writes, unexpressed resentment jelled into bitterness and insecurity, overlaid with “a careful assortment of warm childhood memories” and a rigorously maintained distance from both his parents.

Rabbi Lelyveld, a pillar of the nation’s Reform Jewish community, did not dwell on their emotional gap. He was a conscientious objector in World War II, a tireless proponent of Zionism, a leader in Cleveland’s struggle to integrate schools. After the 1964 disappearance of three young civil rights workers, he went to Mississippi, where he was assaulted by white segregationists. A photo of the bloodied rabbi flashed on front pages around the country. The rabbi delivered the eulogy at a memorial for Andrew Goodman, one of the slain workers. “Never did he speak more feelingly, more purely,” Joseph Lelyveld writes.

After a 30-year marriage that included Toby’s hospitalizations, suicide attempts and numerous separations and reconciliations, his parents finally decide to call it quits, announcing the news of their impending divorce at a celebration dinner to honor Joseph and his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary. What to say? “ ‘Mazel tov’ would have sounded sarcastic,” the author notes with a delicious dry wit that infuses the book.

Not until he sits at the bedside of a second dying parent, when he hears “the faint gurgle in her throat heralding her departure,” does Lelyveld finally grieve for his mother, for himself, for his whole family. “Once again, when it was too late to say so,” he writes, “I felt I loved a parent of mine unreservedly.”

In this tender, lucid memoir, narrated with wisdom and humility, Lelyveld makes peace with the past.

Louise Steinman is the author of “The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.”