Relative truth: Joe Lelyveld takes on his toughest assignment: his family

Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop By Joseph Lelyveld Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $22.00

If you could document that your mother really was no good at loving you, would you do it? Actually following the old newsroom admonition, "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out," Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor of The New York Times, answers yes. And instead of settling, as most of us do, for he said/she said/I said--that is your reality and this is mine, OK?--he attempts to learn all that can be learned about his volatile, self-thwarting mother and his benign but unavailable father, as well as various earlier versions of the guy he calls "my sometimes puzzling self."

In Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop, he certainly buries the lede, but then, that's both the intention and the genius of the book, in which he writes, "History may be linear but memory, at least mine, isn't; it runs in loops." This particular am of memory will inevitably be compared to Katharine Graham's memoir, Personal History, because it is just as fine and because Lelyveld has left himself just as undefended. Yet this is another kind of book, more jagged than a traditional autobiography; and not particularly chronological. It sets out subtly and concludes with such force that you may fed obliged to begin again and read Omaha Blues the way it was remembered.

Lelyveld, born in 1937, rose from copy boy to foreign correspondent to executive editor of The New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for his deeply reported book on South Africa under apartheid, Move Your Shadow. He ran the paper from 1994 to 2001 and then again, briefly, after his successor was forced out only 21 months after he had left. Yet this is an almost Times-less tale and contains not a word about just desserts served in record time. Instead, in retirement, he finds himself looking back, all the way to childhood. Then he assigns himself the scariest imaginable reporting job, that of investigating his own early life.

For years, Lelyveld complains mildly, the media writers who covered him tended to sum him up in two words: "rabbi's son," a phrase apparently opposite in implication to the stereotype of the wild-child preacher's daughter. He never sought to explain himself further, and it's not clear that he could have. As he tells it, he never had any firm handle on his own situation as a boy; he did not always know where his family would end up next or whether they would be there together. What seemed true one day might not last the night. And like not a few others in the profession, he seems later to have been attracted to the business of recording reality as a result. As a reporter, it must have been easy for him to find the lie or face even the ugliest fact of life with not so much detachment as relief.

But in this memoir, he goes further, and, with more emotional fearlessness than journalism ever requires, tests the reliability of everything he thought he knew about his early life. "I've been wandering the land, looking up old acquaintances or their survivors, indulging the rage pathetic old folks baffled by life's swift passage sometimes feel to find out what actually happened when they were too young or too stunned to take it all in," he writes. Inevitably, he discovers that some of his strongest memories have been doctored over the years. Others prove all too true. Starting at the age of 5, for instance, he was shuttled off to friends, relatives, and even a Nebraska farm family of Seventh Day Adventists, while his mother, an aspiring Shakespeare scholar, returned to Columbia University to work on her doctorate and mull over whether to stay married to the steadfast rabbi she blamed for derailing her career. This period was, and has remained, a confusing time for their son.

After reading a cache of old letters found in the basement of his father's former synagogue, Lelyveld no longer has to wonder whether his mother was avoiding him as well as his father in the summer of 1942. In those letters to his father, she repeatedly described him as an annoyance and wrote that she was absolutely "dreading the thought of coping with the noise again" when mother and child were reunited. Yet, true to himself, and to the newsman's religious belief in the salutary effect of even the most painful facts, Lelyveld seems unburdened now that he knows: That is how it was, then.

Just as his parents' marriage is finally breaking up in the summer of 1964, his father heads off to register black voters in Mississippi, a trip which ended in his being beaten by racist obstructers. "Some thirty years later," Lelyveld writes, "I opened a survey form from the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, that had been mailed to newspaper editors across the country. 'Have you ever heard of Hattiesburg, Mississippi?' the first question asked. I checked 'yes.' 'If yes, in what context?' it continued. 'My father was beaten there with a tire iron in the summer of 1964,' I wrote."