Heshel's Kingdom

by Dan Jacobson

Published 16 February 1998
The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death by heart attack in 1919 set his widow and children free to leave Lithuania. In this deeply personal memoir, his grandson journeys to the nation after the fall of Communism, and his story is both a philosophical tableau of secularism, religion, and family and a communion with history's darkness-and, where possible, its illumination.