The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death by heart attack in 1919 set his widow and children free to leave Lithuania, the country that he insisted be their home. In light of the Holocaust that took place in Europe twenty years later, his death became, ironically, a gift of life: Heshel Melamed's family left Europe before the war and settled safely in South Africa. In Heshel's Kingdom, Dan Jacobson recounts his journey in the 1990s to post-Communist Lithuania, where he searched for traces of his grandfather Heshel's world. More than a genealogical narrative, however, this deeply personal memoir becomes at times a philosophical tableau of secularism, religion, family, and modern Judaism.