Heshel's Kingdom

In 1919 Heshel Melamed, a rabbi in the small provincial Lithuanian town of Varniai, presented his wife and their nine children with his greatest and most unexpected gift: at the age of fifty-three he died, suddenly, of a heart attack. Heshel's widow, children and grandchildren were thus set free to establish themselves safely seven thousand miles away in South Africa. As a result, they were spared the Nazi invasion and the tidal wave of killing that was to engulf virtually the entire Jewish population of Lithuania twenty years later. In a final effort to discover and imagine more of Heshel's life, Jacobson set out with his son - Heshel's great grandson - to visit Varniai, to see the town with his own eyes and to find out if any memory of the rabbi and his community could still be found there. The result is a compelling climax to a passionate and beautifully written book.