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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.

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom about Jacobson's travel to Lithuania in search of the writer's \"middle-European\" patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson's book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. Tlris hintemational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to \"unlearn\" imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the \"heart of the country\" and the \"core of Europe.\" as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

Jacobson maintains that, as a child growing up in Kimberley, he had invested with fantasy the landscape of the historical route from the Cape Colony to the African interior, one that is said to have registered an unconscious anxiety that there might, in fact, 'be nothing there'. On his return as adult to this landscape, he wonders whether or not he will discover a void in the heart of the imagined plenitude. In this paper, I explore the relationship between the putative landscape of history and the landscape of fantasy, arguing that, by problematising the boundary between them, Jacobson's account of his journey along the 'missionary road' creates productive ambiguities.

Ashkenazi Jews fleeing during the first and second world wars came to find they were not perceived as fully white in their host countries. In Apartheid South Africa, a host country for many Lithuanian Jewish exiles, they denoted surrogate whiteness. Dan Jacobson's 1959 story \"The Zulu and the Zeide\" comments on how the proxy position of Jews enabled them to pass between white colonial and black African society. The Zeide and his son represent two generational responses to bigotry: the wandering generation finds little to lose in a pluralistic outlook, while the landed one faces self-hatred, nationalist imperative, and social risk in the fight to belong. While Jews were influential in ending. Apartheid this article provides a historical and psychological overview of how the spectre of nationalism and the precarious position of Jews in white colonial South African society limited the liberal project to the extent that it imperilled intimacies and crosscultural relationships between black and Jewish South Africans. Moreoever, the the Zeide signifies that only when a man is stripped of his memory and place can he be liberated from the trauma of race.

South African writer Dan Jacobson has created a new paradigm for himself as an expatriate writer. While conforming to some extent to Claudio Guillen's and Andrew Gurr's theories about writers in exile, he has also deviated from established patterns. South Africa as the homeland is a haunting memory in his earlier works and even in his recent fiction Jacobson reveals his fascination with the past and with memory. Jacobson has used his familiarity with two cultures to create a literature of multiple exposure.

Scholars have commented on the similarity between images of eyes in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Breton's Nadja. While Sebald was familiar with texts by the surrealists, notably Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris, I argue that his knowledge of their work was significantly mediated by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's essentially skeptical view of the movement's aim to achieve insight through the workings of chance gives way in Austerlitz to a more profoundly pessimistic view on the possibility of such insight. Whatever hope Benjamin may still have harbored for moments of what he called \"profane illumination\" is occluded by the historical events that subtend Sebald's narrative, ranging from imperialism to the Holocaust. Austerlitz emphasizes this point in its concluding reflections on Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom, a family story that moves from the dark past of South Africa to the Nazi atrocities in Lithuania.