Dan Jacobson's "Mattering Map": Heshel's Kingdom as a Split-Screen Family Album

Abstract:In Heshel's Kingdom, Dan Jacobson explores the impact of the British Empire's expansion on Lithuanian Jewry. His memoir constructs a "mattering map" of the experience of his family, after the death of his grandfather, Heshel. Like more than thirty thousand other Jews, the bereaved family moved to a welcoming South Africa.Heshel's Kingdom is a split/screen account, alternating between Kimberley, South Africa, and Varniai, Lithuania. Their juxtaposition leads Dan Jacobson to chart the experiences of two Jewish communities, and construct a narrative map of familial and communal life. This split/screen account is not symmetrical. For the South Africa narrative, the narrator relies on familial and personal history. But for Lithuania he must tease out information from absence, seeking bits and remnants of the murdered Lithuanian Jewish community in order to find a purchase on which to reconstruct life in his grandfather's Varniai, a small, Nazi-destroyed Lithuanian town.The narrator interrogates the images of the two communities: Jacobson addresses the jacket-cover photograph of grandfather Heshel as if it might speak to him, and thus help him discover details of the life of his Lithuanian grandfather, whom he never knew. Asking questions, Jacobson invites the reader to engage with him as if they were looking together at a family-album: familial-networks begin to emerge, and kinship relationships elaborate the family's life in South Africa; once activated the narrator can tease it into continuing the search for family experience. But the questions about Lithuania do not elicit much in the way of answers, for that Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian helpers. Following the narrator's lead, the reader's imagination works to construct a comparative account both of the Jewish immigration to South Africa and the Jewish catastrophe in Lithuania, defining a "mattering map" of modern Jewish experience.