D. J. ENRIGHT

The Lucky Ones

Heshel's Kingdom by Dan Jacobson (Hamish Hamilton, 15.99)

Dan Jacobson has a personal interest in his maternal grandfather, Heshel Melamed, erstwhile rabbi in the small Lithuanian town of Varniai. Rich in conviction, poor in other respects, the rabbi had contemplated moving his family to the United States, where material prospects were much rosier; in 1912 he visited this secular version of the promised land, and was offered a position in Cleveland, Ohio. It seems he found the Jewish community there all too secular, and returned to Lithuania. It made no difference to his decision, though no doubt it did to his feelings, that his wife was something of a rebel, with a taste for such unorthodox reading as Renan's Life of Jesus, and one son ran away from the yeshiva where he was to prepare for the rabbinate.

Heshel Melamed was a man of unbending principle. He died in 1919, aged fifty-three, leaving his widow and their nine children homeless and penniless, but free to emigrate to South Africa, where they had kin. 'For all the hardships they went through in the new country, they did not doubt that in leaving Lithuania they had exchanged night for the promise of day, superstition for the promise of reason, limitation and frustration for a hitherto unimaginable degree of personal autonomy.' The family promptly rejected everything their father had believed in, except for their mother, rebellious as ever, who turned back to her husband's piousness. Had they stayed in Lithuania, they would have shared the fate of their neighbours and relatives. Dan Jacobson has a very personal interest in his grandfather; if the rabbi had not died when he did, Jacobson would never have been born.

Lithuania was 'the place my mother had escaped from: nothing else, nothing more'. But, spurred on by a photograph of his grandfather taken before the journey to the United States, Jacobson decided to visit the country, to see what traces remained of the rabbi and his community. He had felt resentment and reproach towards Heshel Melamed, his inexcusable (if innocent) rectitude and intransigence, and more so towards his religion, 'wrong, fatal, misguided' on every count. What Jacobson found in Lithuania, and couldn't find, changed his feelings. 'The strongest emotions I remember from my visit are sadness, a stunned sadness of a kind I had never felt before, and an almost constant sense of humiliation. How feeble my imagination was! How carefully I had protected it, or allowed it to protect me, from the pain that might otherwise have threatened it! It was the killers who were inexcusable.

Meeting 'the last Jew' in this town and that - the encounters are finely described, even with touches of humour - Jacobson is conscious of large holes where once there were Jewish communities. In an old Jewish cemetery where no gravestone was dated later than May 1941, Simon, his travelling companion and son, remarked, 'So these are the lucky ones; they were allowed a natural death.' The inscriptions on memorials to the Jewish dead take the form, 'THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE NAZIS AND THEIR ASSISTANTS KILLED MORE THAN 30,000 JEWS FROM LITHUANIA AND OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES'. Jacobson learns that the post-Soviet government had planned a reference simply to 'Nazis', while the remaining Jews wanted 'Nazis and their Lithuanian assistants'. A compromise was reached. One can't really expect governments to proclaim their national guilt with total explicitness.

And now? Most people, Jacobson observes, want to get on with their own lives. A harmless, commendable desire, one would say. But 'own' needs 'the other', something to define itself against; 'identity' and a measure of solidarity are achieved at the cost of a common enemy, an ongoing condition which Jacobson terms 'oppugnancy'. He cites South Africa; of course the phenomenon exists pervasively and nearer home: the word 'ethnic' has acquired chilling overtones. This book, scrupulous, self-examining, and lucid in matter and manner, ends on a dark note: 'Not any more. Not until next time.' But what other kind of note could it honestly end on?