In 1919 Heshel Melamed, a rabbi in the smali 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 widów, 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.
Prompted by a few of his grandfather's possessions that had come down to him across the decades - a pair of spectacles, an address book, a single photograph - Dan Jacobson tells the story of Heshel and his descendants. Everywhere he encounters puzzles, ambiguities and fateful turning-points in the history of nations and individual characters alike. Why, in the course of a short life, did Heshel change his identity not once, but twice? What manner of violent death eventually came to the aunts, uncles and cousins left behind in Lithuania? What kind of lives opened up before those members of the family who had settled in South Africa? In dealing with these ąuestions, Jacobson also raises the most puzzling ąuestion of all: the naturę of the physical and morał inheritance bequeathed by the past to each of us. What has Heshel, this unknown and almost unknowable man, handed on to his descendants - apart, perhaps, from a propensity to heart disease?
In a final effort to discover and imagine morę 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.
- Autor: Dan Jacobson
- Kategoria: literatura piękna
- Język: angielski
- ISBN: 0241139279
- Data wydania: 1998-01-01
- Liczba stron: 242
- Ocena: 0,0
- Wydawnictwo: Hamish Hamilton
