In 1964, an Ohio rabbi named Arthur Lelyveld went to Hattiesburg, Miss., and started knocking on doors in black neighborhoods, encouraging people to register to vote. A local white man promptly bashed his head in with a tire iron.

A photograph of the blood-soaked clergyman, a bandage dangling over his mutilated face, flashed around the world as a searing reminder of the color-blind homicidal rage of white supremacy. As James Meredith has pointed out, whites were victims of segregation, too-if they were afraid to act against it, they weren't free. It was the field-execution murder of civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner a few weeks earlier that inspired Lelyveld to journey to Mississippi, and the rabbi recovered from his wounds to give an eloquent oration at Andrew Goodman's funeral.

The rabbi's son Joseph, then a young reporter, went on to become executive editor of The New York Times (1994 to 2001), a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his 1985 book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White) and now author of Omaha Blues, a spellbinding memoir that explores the collision of memory with reality.

It must be hell for a Timesman to try to write a memoir. There's not really much fresh material to work with. Jack Kennedy dazzled you at a Cape Cod fish fry in 1960, but the crowd was thick and few words were exchanged. Lyndon Johnson screamed pungent oaths at you on the phone one day over a forgotten Vietnam story, but he did that to a dozen other guys in the Times newsroom, a.k.a. journalism's Mount Olympus. You yearned to go to Peking in 1972, but Nixon loathed your bosses for publishing the Pentagon Papers and he gleefully bumped all Times staff off the plane except Max Frankel.

You squeeze out a few pages on Scotty Reston's battles with New York and the baroque psychohistory of the Sulzbergers, stir in some color on your drinking problems and the desperate nightmare that was your first marriage, and, well, what are you left with? The stories behind how you wrote your stories-which aren't, as a rule, remotely as interesting as the stories themselves.

Mercifully, Joseph Lelyveld wastes little time on Times Byzantiniae, choosing instead to write a compact, episodic, intensely personal saga of family fractures and self-discovery. The springboards for the journey are devices that could be borrowed from a magical-realist or Nicholas Sparks novel: "The Deathbed" and "The Box of Letters". As the rabbi lay dying in a hospice, Joseph, now in his 60's, uncovered a collection of letters and personal papers in a trunk his father stashed away in his synagogue basement. They led him on a quest to find witnesses and more documents to try to reconstruct the story of his past, especially his rather desolate childhood.

The idea of conducting a thorough journalistic investigation of your own family is a frightening one. Shake many an American family tree and you'll unleash flocks of skeletons, Willy Lomans and Flem Snopses, scenes of Dickensian melodrama and Gothic horror. Mr. Lelyveld's journey provides several startling episodes, among the most poignant when he reads letters in which his mother confesses in real time what she thinks of him as a little boy, over a half-century earlier. Gradually, he found "it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood, not to the point of total recall of course, but at least to a point where you could begin to see the cunning and willfulness of the selections of your own personal memory console."

The book focuses on four people: Mr. Lelyveld himself; his parents, ambitious New York intellectuals who met at Columbia University and spent several decades in a mostly doomed attempt at a relationship; and a charismatic family friend named Benjamin Goldstein, also a rabbi, who briefly served as a kind of surrogate uncle or stand-in father for the boy and whose exuberance contrasted with Rabbi Lelyveld's genial detachment. Popping in for a vivid cameo is a family friend, the legendary New York power rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

In 1931, Ben Goldstein took an appointment at Temple Beth Or in Montgomery, Ala., and he soon began orating for justice for the Scottsboro Boys, black men wrongly convicted of raping two white women on a train. Rule No. 1 for white citizens in this time and place (and many others, of course), especially Jews dangling on the fragile edge of the segregation moral fault line, was keep your mouth shut. Likely minimum penalty: You got run out of town on a rail. Maximum: You got yourself killed.

Goldstein kept right on speaking out over the distressed hushes of his fellow Jews, and predictably he was tossed out of Montgomery. His little crusade has a stark symmetry with Rabbi Lelyveld's sacrificial mutilation in Hattiesburg 32 years later as an act of pure moral courage. The nobility of both acts seems quixotic in retrospect only because of the infinitesimal number of other whites who dared act so freely. The vast number of Caucasian Americans in the South and the North-including any number of leaders like F.D.R., Eisenhower and J.F.K.-were delighted to stumble through life as de facto segregationist collaborators, rarely if ever lifting a finger to challenge the national theology of white supremacy.

But Mr. Lelyveld's research reveals that the friendship between the two rabbis was destined for a showdown over another titanic moral debate-the one over Communism. A dispirited Goldstein drifted into, of all things, the business of peddling Soviet propaganda films in Hollywood (now there's a high concept), and along the way he developed, like so many other brainy lefties of the era, a love jones for Joe Stalin. This triggered the opening of Goldstein's F.B.I. file and a confrontation with the elder Lelyveld.

Mother and father were mostly absent from Joseph's childhood, both emotionally and physically. The rabbi traveled the country organizing for Jewish groups, and the mother, Toby, a troubled, ambitious Shakespearean scholar, became so frustrated with her professional ambitions that she abdicated her parental role and bolted back to Columbia University to finish her doctorate and essentially exit the marriage. Young Joseph was shuttled from Omaha, where his father had a congregation, to a Seventh Day Adventist summer camp (also in Nebraska), to the distant, frightening landscape of Brooklyn to stay with his grandparents, eventually landing in P.S. 165 on the Upper West Side. Mr. Lelyveld's sketches of moments from his childhood are striking and lyrical, conjuring a searing portrait of the alienation and confusion of a boy cast adrift.

Memories are strange creatures-they appear uninvited, grab you by the throat, flood your senses and then shoot away in a microsecond, leaving few traces. Mr. Lelyveld explores some intriguing themes: How much do we really remember? Why do we forget? What would happen if we found documentary records or witnesses who could fill in missing pieces of our imagined family narrative? What hidden catastrophes would fly out?

At the bottom of Pandora's mythical box of sorrows were small slices of hope, and Mr. Lelyveld's memory box has some, too: fleeting moments of warmth and connection between his parents, secretly witnessing their stolen kiss on the living-room couch in a small, borrowed penthouse on West 84th Street. "I remember, too," writes Mr. Lelyveld, "my parents doing the samba at the center of a dance floor at a ridiculously extravagant bar mitzvah reception at the Waldorf. All the other dancers stepped back to gape. They couldn't get over the idea that a rabbi and his wife could throw themselves into the samba with such supple, unaffected zest."

Joseph Lelyveld tells his story with a similar kind of energy, and what he gives us is a haunting reflection on memories and why we polish some of them to a sweet golden haze.

William Doyle is author of An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (Anchor) and Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (Kodansha).

Mr. Oberst is in quite a confessional mood on his latest, somewhat grandly titled CD, Lifted, or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Saddle Creek).

But don't let that smudge of pretension get in the way. On Lifted , Mr. Oberst–as–Bright Eyes enlists the listener to become his shrink as the singer/songwriter examines himself vividly and ruthlessly, spilling his guts across 13 songs that total 73 minutes of music. It's an incredibly ballsy album: naked and real, uneven at times, but completely honest. It's also his best, most emotionally sophisticated and tuneful album to date. Mr. Oberst is an authentic Ryan Adams, with the kind of passion and purpose that hasn't been applied by a fashion stylist.

Perhaps because Mr. Oberst, given his age, is still struggling to find his identity, the subject looms large on Lifted . In "False Advertising," one of the finer cuts from the album, Bright Eyes sings: "And I know what must change / Fuck my face / Fuck my name, / They are brief and false advertisements …. "

Lifted is Bright Eyes' fourth full-length record (not counting a number of EP's he's released over the years), and the artistic distance he's come is notable. Earlier records veered toward the punkish, and though traces of that genre persist-most notably in Mr. Oberst's other project, Los Desaparecidos-he seems to have settled into a folk-rockish singer/songwriter mode.

On Lifted , Mr. Oberst's melodic skills are on full display as he shifts gracefully through a spectrum of styles, from pseudo–talking blues to waltzes. He's managed to curtail the metaphorical excess of his earlier albums, while once again demonstrating that he is one of the most literate and witty songwriters of his generation.

Lifted is a coming-of-age song cycle that deals with the moment at which love can no longer be idealized; that moment when the innocence of youth becomes hardened by the complacency and cynicism of adulthood. It's a well-trodden path, full of fragrant, sophomoric soap opera, but Mr. Oberst finds fresh material by essentially flaying himself alive. On the stark "Waste of Paint," Mr. Oberst seems to sing from a street puddle, nearly shouting the lines "Like love is some kind of lottery / Where you scratch and see what's underneath / It's 'Sorry,' just one cherry / 'Play again' / Get lucky."

Throughout the album, Mr. Oberst, who sounds like a more fragile version of the Cure's Robert Smith, inhabits his lyrics, communicating his emotional distress with whispers and bellows and wavers and cracks in his voice.

The best song of the album-and arguably of his career-is "You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will." And as its Raymond Carver–esque title suggests, it surgically cuts to the very heart of the matter, which is the end of a relationship in which the woman seems to have grown up faster than the singer. "You say that I treat you like a book on a shelf," he sings nearly matter-of-factly, "I don't take you out that often / Because I know that I completed you / And that is why you are here / That is the reason you stay here / How awful that must feel." The metaphor-somewhat clunky though it may be-is beautifully attenuated. He comes back to it in one of the final verses, singing "It took so long to figure out / What this book has been about."

The final verse is the punch in the gut-the relationship isn't dead, just dying: "Now I write when I'm away / letters that you'll never read / You said to go explore those other women / the geography of their bodies / but there's just one map you'll need / You are a boomerang, you'll see / You will return to me."

Listening to Mr. Oberst is like listening to Bob Dylan in the mid-60's: What he's saying is fundamentally altered by the way he says it. He's his only interpreter, and a consummate one at that. When he looks back-and sometimes it can be nauseating when someone so young adopts that role-we are interested, because his desire is not to regress, but rather to push into a clearing.

Lifted isn't perfect, even if certain songs are damn close. "Lover I Don't Have to Love," with its sharply grating drum loop, is nearly unbearable and makes you reach for the skip button. And the final cut, "Let's Not Shit Ourselves," falls flat on its face once Mr. Oberst starts to rail against the mass media. He's too fine a student of the soul to waste his words on such tired targets. Mr. Oberst gives-and shows you-everything that's in him; he practically turns himself inside-out on this album. So take the good with the bad; forgive his excesses even as you embrace them. It's the kind of contradiction Bright Eyes would appreciate, and Mr. Oberst would despise.

My first reaction was anxiety-and not because of my aversion to smoke or limited gambling skills. Although I'd known each player for anywhere from two to 35 years, I was apprehensive about my ability to fit in with the men's club of cigarettes, braggadocio and one-upsmanship, a world that can still puzzle me despite a lifetime of seeing a man in the mirror every morning.

I've always been one of those men who feels pretty comfortable doing "unmanly" things-putting my daughters' hair in pigtails, shopping for jewelry, going along on school field trips, cleaning the refrigerator. This sometimes earns me a quizzical glance or a nervous joke from other men, but most of the time it makes me feel good about myself-and modern. But not in scenarios like poker games.

As a kid, when I went to sleep-away camp, I chose one that was low-testosterone; the campers were mostly suburban Jews like me, not typically among the world's foremost athletes. But even in this environment, I still felt a little out of sync. While most of my peers were gung-ho about soccer and tennis, my happiest days were spent holed up in the theater, the darkroom and the radio station. I was the only kid in my camp's history to opt out of the end-of-summer color war as a conscientious objector. In high school, my only appearances on an athletic field were marching at half time, playing a saxophone.

I have maintained some traditionally male enthusiasms, including a fascination with baseball and music trivia, and an overambitious Mr. Fix-It streak. But the day I discovered in high-school gym class that my legs could lift the entire weight stack on the Nautilus machine-more than several guys on the football team-I was just embarrassed. That didn't feel like me.

In college, I had my one fling with machismo: I joined the freshman crew. For months, I ran up and down flights of stairs, wrestled oar machines and rowed up and down the river in grunting military unison. Despite hours in the trenches with my fellow oarsmen, I felt no connection to them, no team spirit. They seemed to have no personalities whatsoever, just grim determination. After crossing the finish line of our first race, I quit. I soon joined the newspaper and the radio station, took classes in photography and film, and moved off-campus so I could cook my own meals.

Along the way, beginning around eighth grade, I found myself gravitating toward the company of women. Some of it was everyday flirting, but it ran deeper than that. I just preferred their company: their easygoing intimacy, their empathy, their nurturing. Sure, I have close male friends, and, one-on-one, guys are capable of personal revelation, but such moments are usually brief and rare. Women tend to cut to the emotional chase a lot faster, whether out of some chromosomal tendency or sheer efficiency (especially when they become mothers).

Over the years, I've gamely gone through the motions of classic guy rituals-bachelor parties at strip clubs, group outings to steam baths, touch-football games, sporting events-but I've often felt self-conscious. Then when my wife returned to work after our first daughter was born, I morphed into a stay-at-home father and freelance writer, simultaneously trying to stay out of the sitter's way and be available to the kids. Later, I became one of only two fathers in a giant mommy-and-me singing group and met a new crop of impressive, interesting women. Occasionally I felt weird pushing the stroller through Fairway. As Loudon Wainwright III sings in "Me and All the Other Mothers": "We're sipping on our coffee containers / and chit-chatting, telling little white lies / Labor horror stories and painless abortions / I wasn't feeling like one of the guys …. "

I wondered if the poker game might be a turning point, a male-bonding breakthrough. Guys talking freely about their lives and their wives, with the understanding that it would all be off the record. I imagined frank talk about books we were reading, difficulties with our families, funny things we'd figured out in recent therapy sessions, career tensions, wistful longings-basically, the kinds of discussions I'd grown accustomed to having with women, some of whom were married to these same men.

Instead, the three hours of our game were taken up with one subject: poker. This was a serious crowd. Two guys brought their own chips; two abstained from drinking to keep their senses sharp. There was showmanship about obscure variations (Omaha, Cincinnati, Steinbrenner), macho chip-tossing, teasing about rule-bending and-occasionally between games-a passing reference to something in the news.

I watched the others having a great time and became convinced there was something wrong with me. This was what they all craved: time away from the women, the pure showy adroitness of brains, booze, bluffs and billfolds. After an hour of trying to keep up, I felt itchy. I would have killed for one "tale of sexual performance," tall or otherwise. I realized I'd rather be sitting at a bar talking to the wives. Did this make me less of a man? Or just a crummy poker player? I kept wandering away from the table.

In a night that left various players up $200 and down $80, I went home only $7 poorer, so I thought I had acquitted myself admirably. But a few weeks later I ran into one of the other players, and he told me that my restlessness had thrown off his game. Well, I replied, poker's really not my thing; I would rather have been out at a bar with all of you talking. He stared at me, baffled.

Soon after, I found out another game had been scheduled, and because of my evident lack of interest, they'd filled my spot with a hard-core poker-playing lawyer-a guy's guy-who won big.

That night, I went out for a drink with two women and had a great time. I didn't worry for a moment whether I was being discussed back at the game. They're guys; they only talked about poker. Right?

The place made sense to me the moment I walked in, like St. Patrick's might to a different sort of man. Behind the desk was a girl who looked just like you'd hope she would, counting out green, red and black poker chips. She asked me what level I was playing, and before I finished answering she had the right amount broken down, stacked up and slid across the desk for me to take to my table of choice.

I played Texas Hold'em that night, but the only thing I was holding when I went home was my MetroCard. I had been cleaned out by men who knew how to fold early, bet strong and run the table like Rudy runs the city: with total authority. These were men with names like Joel Bagels, Freddy the Watch, Joe Angel, Johnny Handsome, Johnny Dark and Johnny Boy, who was neither a boy nor named Johnny. These were men who "knew people," men you wouldn't want to look at the wrong way, men who called the waitresses "dear." Staring down these card sharps over a pair of eights or four to a flush, I felt like Jerry Quarry must have as he glanced across the ring at a young Muhammad Ali. I knew I was going to lose; I just hoped I wouldn't get K.O.'d.

Still, I came out swinging, fighting to ignore the churning in my guts, the pulsing at my temples and the rivulets of cold sweat that were growing on my upper lip when I tried to hard-sell a bluff. Didn't matter. They clocked me as an amateur and busted me out.

When you get broke at a card table-really gutted-here's what happens: You sit there for a moment, grappling to find a graceful exit. You realize there isn't one and push back from the table with your head down and the blood slowly starting to creep out of your face. You rise as some other guy slides around you and into what was, until moments ago, your seat. Then you start calculating: what kind of money you have left at home, what you could've done differently, what you're going to have to do later to find a way to fall asleep.

It's at this moment that most people walk away for good. They've taken their shot with the professionals and decided that they'll stick to the occasional home game with their buddies from school, work, the old days. But as I watched my last chip being raked from the center of the table into someone else's pile, I knew two things: I was out of my league, and I would be back tomorrow.

I came back, the next night and the night after that. I didn't become a top player-that takes too much discipline and talent-but I made a good run at it. I won thousands and lost thousands more. I skipped work when I shouldn't have and came home later than I had any right to. But I have a patient wife, and we survived it. My partner Levien and I even wrote a movie about the place, called Rounders , that came pretty close to capturing what it felt like to go all in with nines full against aces full of nines.

What no movie could capture, though, was the rhythm of a routine Sunday night at the Mayfair. There were usually eight games going, from 5-10 Hi-Lo stud, where you could win or lose $500, to the Top Game, 75-150 HOSE, where you stood to risk upwards of $5,000 a night rotating between Hold'em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Stud and Stud Hi-Lo.

The games began around 8 o'clock, and if you arrived early, you'd hang your jacket in the closet, tell the desk what game you were playing, and try to quiet the anticipation that you knew was showing on your face. While you were waiting, you might pick up a pool cue if you were handy with one, or grab the Post off one of the chairs to check the betting lines.

A waitress would approach and ask how you did the night before, even though she probably already knew the answer. "Up a few hundred," you might say, or "They hurt me in here last night," or "Same as always." She'd smile, or nod in sympathy, and ask if you were planning on eating anything. As you watched her heading back to the kitchen, the front door would buzz open, allowing a few more players to enter the club. You'd take your chips, move over to your seat at the table, and forget to look up again until the rest of the city was deep into its morning-exercise routine.

Poker players will tell you that gamblers are suckers. What they mean to say is that, at poker-unlike blackjack, craps or any other casino game-you do not start out with house odds against you. In fact, at poker, you do not play against the house at all. The card room merely collects an hourly rent on the time you spend at the table. This rent is known as "the rake." It is what distinguishes the poker club from the casino, and it is what kept the Mayfair in business for generations until that recent night when the battering ram led New York's Finest through the door.

The Mayfair club is gone now. It's gone the way of the topless joints and the squeegee men and the three-card-monte hustlers on West Broadway, and New York is none the better for it. But the thing about this town is, even Mayor Giuliani can't outlast it. He will be gone soon enough, and soon enough the city will breathe. Space will be rented, and card tables will come out of the closets along with the card players.

In poker, there is a moment when all the betting is done and the cards are turned face up. It is called "the showdown." No more talking, bluffing or angle shooting; the cards speak, and the winner is announced. For the denizens of the Mayfair club, it was when they were most alive, when they had put it all on the line, when they were either going to get cracked or paid off. And that's the way I want to remember the place: at the end of a huge hand, the chips piled to the ceiling in the middle of the table, the cards about to be flipped over, all the players leaning in, even a few waitresses stopping for just a second to look. All of us caught up in it, underground, but somehow above the whole city, waiting to see who held the aces.

We went to Normandy not as tourists but as pilgrims intent on seeing with our own eyes the relics of another generation's sacrifice. Baby boomers and sons of combat veterans, we had never heard a shot fired in anger, but we surely had been reared in the shadow of conflict. We heard no stories about the glory of war (this conspicuous silence persuaded us that there is none), but we absorbed lessons about duty and honor and the common good, and of this nation's capacity for both greatness and goodness. Times and attitudes were different then.

Although neither of our fathers landed on D-Day (his dad served on a battleship in the South Pacific; mine, slightly too young for World War II, was one of the front-line cops during our "police action" against the Communists in Korea), the beaches, bluffs and hedgerows of Normandy symbolized, in our eyes, their courage and honor and eventual triumph in a perilous time. In their early 20's, they had saved the country and the world, and then they shed their weapons and got married and bought homes and had children and lived lives far removed from the horrors of the foxhole and the foibles of international politics: the Cincinnatus Generation.

My buddy and I had divergent interests and outlooks, but we had in common a reverence for our soldier-fathers and for a generation of men and women that had known and survived economic calamity and a Homeric struggle against ferocious evil. Though born 11 years and four months after D-Day, I can recite from memory lines from Franklin Roosevelt's speech to the nation on the evening of June 6, 1944: He offered a prayer for "our sons" who fought "not for conquest, but to end conquest … and to set free a suffering humanity." I was given a tape of that speech when I was 10 years old. I have it still.

I have, too, a plastic bag filled with sand taken from Omaha Beach, the god-awful place where D-Day would have fallen apart but for the courage of America's citizen soldiers. Above the beach, on a bluff from which the Germans fired at the American invaders with such murderous effect, rows of crosses and Stars of David silently speak of the cost of all that we take for granted-and, indeed, all that the world-weary among us mock.

The great achievement of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is not so much its brilliant re-creation of the horrors and confusion of battle, but its tribute to the ordinary men who performed extraordinary deeds in the face of unknowable horror. It has been interpreted, understandably, as a reminder to the succeeding generation that nothing it does will approach what Maureen Dowd called the "nobility" of the men and women who had their hands on the torch that was passed from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Nobility, of course, doesn't (or shouldn't) require the peculiar sort of courage and selflessness that wartime demands. But Ms. Dowd and others are on to something: The lives of most boomers are shallow, self-indulgent and indeed insignificant compared to their parents. The problem, or tragedy, is that a fair portion of the boomers revel in their own triviality. One need only examine the Manhattan-based entertainment and media industry, run by and for boomers, to conclude that the children of D-Day have substituted irony for decency and cynicism for courage, allowing them to conclude that nothing really matters.

They-we-abhor anything that suggests seriousness of purpose. We are content to remain eternal sophomores: My kids call their friends' parents by their first names. What boomer wishes to be addressed with a prefix? But on the History Channel the other night, journalist Sander Vanocur was interviewing two 70-something D-Day veterans. They replied to his questions by calling him "Mister Vanocur." Imagine one of us on a nighttime talk show, calling a certain host "Mister Rose."

In the years since our journey, my buddy and I talked often about what we saw in Normandy, and you can be sure he was amused some years later when I married the daughter of a soldier who, as circumstance would have it, landed on those very beaches on June 6, 1944.

He died, my buddy did, just over a year ago after a struggle with cancer that one could fairly describe as noble. He drew his last breath on a Friday night, a few minutes before midnight, so that his death certificate noted that he died on June 6.

Coincidence, no doubt.