Heshel's Kingdom
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Heshel's Kingdom (1998) is a book by Dan Jacobson.
At the conclusion of his book Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald has his eponymous protagonist take from his rucksack a copy of Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom (1998), the account of Jacobson's journey in the 1990s to Lithuania in search of traces of his grandfather Heshel's world. The orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death in 1919 had provided an opportunity for his widow and nine children to leave Lithuania for South Africa, which, in light of events two decades later, ironically, had been a gift of life. "On his travels in Lithuania Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel's weak heart had preserved his immediate family when it stopped beating."
