Benjamin Pogrund HESHEL’S KINGDOM: A FAMILY, A PEOPLE, A DIVIDED FATE by Dan Jacobson. (Hamish Hamilton)
By dying early, Heshel Melamed gave his children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren the most precious patrimony of all – life. Had his existence continued in the small town of Varniai in Lithuania the family tree would have been terminated by the Nazis who in 1941 virtually wiped out the country’s Jews.
Instead, Heshel’s widow, left penniless and helpless by his death in 1919 at the age of 53, was given family help to emigrate to South Africa with their nine children. In due course the eldest child became the mother of Dan Jacobson.
Jacobson grew up in Kimberley and in early adulthood left for Britain and a distinguished literary career as a novelist and university teacher. He is now professor emeritus in English at University College, London. Heshel’s Kingdom is about his search for his roots.
While that is an accurate summary, putting it so baldly is to undervalue a story whose descriptions of milestones in life – beautifully crafted and lovingly told – repeatedly make the reader want to pause and reflect. Jacobson’s quest is focused on Heshel Melamed: “By evoking the shadow of my grandfather I hope to discover elements in his life and mine which are now hidden from me,” he says.
He starts with scattered family memories and a handful of physical possessions: his grandfather’s identity document, spectacles, an address book; and, foremost, a sepia-tinted photograph, with Heshel’s head crowned by a top hat, his face revealing a “steadiness of gaze” and a determination “to confront and discharge his responsibilities” as befitted the learned rabbi of the main synagogue in the shtetl, the Jewish section of Varniai.
The address book is a record of Heshel’s attempt to emigrate to the United States in 1912. “Each of the entries is particular, it refers to a specific person,” is Jacobson’s evocative description of the pocket- sized address book, “yet taken together, as the brittle pages whisper and shiver under my fingers, they create an effect of a generalised pathos: lives gone, connections lost, tongues fallen silent, buildings in all likelihood long since demolished. Time displayed at its usual relentless work; bringing us into being, sending us into oblivion.”
Heshel was utterly dismayed by his discovery in America that so many immigrant fellow-Jews had turned their backs on their traditions and religion. He returned home with relief, accepting the poverty of the shtetl as the price for the verities of the old ways and his established role as leader and teacher in the faith which was his existence.
Had it continued so his family and the family-to-come would have been doomed. The accident of his early death secured a future existence for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In a blend of personal odyssey, travelogue and forays into the past, Jacobson moves the story from Lithuania to South Africa, to the existences and memories of his mother, aunts and uncles. He tries to fathom the great mysteries in Heshel’s life: that not only had he had a previous marriage but earlier in life he had gone under not one, but two other names. Despite Jacobson’s best endeavours, the secrets remain tantalisingly unsolved.
The end of the Cold War allowed Jacobson to visit Varniai, though today it has only two Jewish residents.
There was no trace of Heshel. In the cemetery, Jacobson found a granite memorial with the words in Yiddish and Lithuanian: “Until 1941 in this place there used to be the Jewish cemetery of Varniai.”
Jacobson writes:”In 1941 the people who should have been buried here went to their deaths anonymously, indiscriminately, and were thrown into the common pits and pyres which their killers had made them prepare beforehand.”
The scale was awesome: within a mere six weeks the Nazis, often with Lithuanian help, murdered some 210 000 Jews, the bulk of the Lithuanian Jewish community.
“On one side of the ocean, life. On the other, death.”
But, asks Jacobson, how would Heshel react if he could know that the life he ensured for his descendants is, for most of them – no less than eight out of 12 great-grandchildren – outside the Jewish faith which was his bedrock?