In the middle 1990s, Jacobson turned to nonfiction. In 1994 he published "The Electronic Elephant: A South African Journey" about his travels back to South Africa to observe the changes in the land and the culture since his childhood. In 1998, "Heshel's Kingdom" provided a moving story of his travels to Lithuania to learn more about the life of his grandfather. He started with his grandfather's identity document, spectacles, an address book, an old photograph, and the memories of relatives. Sadly, he found no trace of his grandfather, and, indeed, not even the cemetery he was buried in remained. He did find that in 1941, within six weeks' time, the Nazis essentially wiped out the Lithuanian Jewish community, killing 210,000 Jewish people.