Many of the published works of South African-born writer Dan Jacobson were autobiographical in nature and explored the theme of family. For example, Heshel’s Kingdom (1998) concerned the life and legacy of Dan’s maternal grandfather Heshel Melamed – a rabbi in the small Lithuanian town of Varniai.

Today, Dan’s daughter Jessica Jacobson and her first cousins Deborah Golden and Ruth Sack are writing a family memoir centred on their grandmother, Liebe, who was the eldest of Heshel’s nine children. Born in 1895, Liebe was independently minded, intellectually curious and ambitious. She migrated to South Africa with her mother and siblings following Heshel’s death in 1919. With husband Michael, she settled in the diamond-mining town of Kimberley, where they raised four children.

The three cousins’ work-in-progress is drawing on Dan’s writings along with unpublished memoirs by other family members; family photographs; and a vast archive of family correspondence. In this presentation, Jessica will outline some of what she and her co-authors have learnt so far – from their disparate and compelling source materials – about Liebe’s life and the paradoxes she embodied.

Jessica Jacobson has had a long career as a social researcher since completing a PhD in the sociology of religion and ethnicity at the London School of Economics (published as Islam in Transition, Routledge, 1997). Since 2010 she has been based at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Professor of Criminal Justice and, from 2013-2024, was Director of the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research. Much of her research focuses on lay participation in judicial processes; publications include Inside Crown Court (with Hunter and Kirby, Policy Press, 2015) and Participation in Courts and Tribunals (co-edited with Cooper, Policy Press, 2020). She recently completed a study of bereaved people’s experiences of coroners’ inquests, Voicing Loss.