by Ezabelle Janssen, Staff Writer

PASS CHRISTIAN (GG) — On Wednesday, March 25th, Pass Books was filled wall-to-wall. At the front stood Nicholas Lemann, whose latest work, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, asks the question, but refuses to answer it linearly. 

“That’s a tough question to answer,” Lemann said with a small smile. “I guess my instinct is to say my home is New Orleans, but I haven’t lived there full-time for over 50 years, but, you know, It’s a very deep-rooted kind of place.” 

Not quite a location. Not quite a memory. Something deeper than both. The idea of home as something inherited, stretched, and redefined threads through Lemann’s book, which traces three generations of his family across centuries, continents, and shifting identities. It’s part history, part self-examination, and, as Lemann admitted, a departure from how he’s spent most of his life writing. 

“I’ve spent my whole life as a journalist,” he said. “So my opening bid in life was: I’m not going to write about myself, my family, or my community, I’m going to write about other stuff.” He paused, almost amused by his own reversal. “So it feels sort of strange to write something personal… but I did it, and I’m glad I did it.” 

Watching a seasoned reporter, whose career includes work with The New Yorker and leadership at Columbia Journalism School, turn his well-honed tools inward became one of the evening’s most compelling undercurrents.

“Research is what I do in life,” Lemann explained. “So it felt very comfortable to use that set of tools to try to understand more about myself.” What he uncovered is a story that moves like a tide, back and forth between places and identities, German Jewish immigrants arriving in the American South. Small beginnings growing into influence. Families moving between Louisiana, New York, and even Europe, adapting, assimilating, sometimes shedding pieces of themselves to belong, sometimes reclaiming them generations later. But identity, as Lemann made clear, is not a fixed inheritance. “I’ve been figuring out my own cultural identity for a really long time,” he said. “Because… the cultural identity I grew up with just sort of doesn’t exist anymore. So we all had to kind of reinvent ourselves somehow.” 

That reinvention sat at the heart of the conversation. His book, structured almost like a palimpsest, reflects three individuals with the same surname living entirely different lives. Same name, different worlds. 

Lemann spoke candidly about the contradictions within his family’s past, success intertwined with systems of inequality, progress layered over more complicated beginnings. There was no attempt to smooth it over, only to understand it more fully. 

Questions came steadily and Lemann’s answers were never rushed. By the end of the night, the conversation had stretched beyond the book itself. 

Lemann, reflecting on his visit, smiled at the setting. “Great,” he said of being back on the Coast. “I used to come here when I was in high school… I haven’t been here in many years,

and it’s beautiful—much better shape than I remembered it being in.“The bookstore wasn’t here when I was growing up, so I’m impressed.” 

That is possibly what the evening offered most, not a clean definition of home, but a recognition that it’s something we return to in pieces. Through memory. Through research. Through stories told in rooms like at Pass Books.

(Photos by Ezabelle Janssen/The Gazebo Gazette)