Letters to my Grandson

His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia who settled in Amsterdam. They brought a world and a religion that was hard to reconcile with their new surroundings. Herzberg tells about his visit to his grandfather in a Jewish village in Lithuania, about the prayer room that his father fitted out in the back of an Amsterdam house, and about the everyday life of Russian Jews in Amsterdam. He introduces his grandson to the principles of Hasidism and explains what being a Jew really means – even for those, like himself, who have stopped being religious. The writer conjures up his world incisively and with an immediacy that is larded with the mild humanism characteristic of all his writing.

The stories teem with unforgettable characters: Herzberg’s grandfather (who is the happiest of men when his grandson shares his table on a Friday night in his small Russian home), his grandmother (who performs the ancient Jewish purification rites in a houseboat on the Amstel river), an aristocratic Jew from St. Petersburg (who lives in shabby splendour) and countless Hasidic teachers who explain God’s will in miraculous stories.

Brieven aan mijn kleinzoon is not only an encounter with a world long gone and an introduction to Jewish rituals and customs; it also drives home the lesson that nothing in life is completely black or white. Herzberg probes deep into everyday emotions, which he describes with compassion but also with mildly ironic detachment. This approach is what helped turn him into a moral authority in the Netherlands. Nowhere in his work is his humane outlook as concrete and at the same time as universally identifiable as it is in Brieven aan mijn kleinzoon, still the best-loved of all his writings.