Olga Tokarczuk

A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ” “Just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed.” – The Washington Post “Olga Tokarczuk is one of our greatest living fiction writers. . . This could well be a decade-defining book akin to Bolaño’s 2666.” –AV Club “Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. . . The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, AND NPR The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence. In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but read traditionally, front cover to back.

A Novel

The Books of Jacob

Księgi Jakubowe

Nate

will not let itself be locked in any prison, iron cage or cage made out of air. My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky, and the body's boundaries cannot hold it back. And no walls will ever imprison it: not those that have been built by human hands. nor the walls of politeness, nor the walls of civility or good manners. It will not be entrapped by pompous speeches, by kingdoms' borders, good breeding-anything. My soul flies over all of that with the greatest ease, it is above what is contained in words, and beyond what cannot even be contained in words. It is beyond pleasure and beyond fear. It exceeds what is lovely and lofty just as it does what is terrible and vile. Help me, merciful God, and keep life from wounding me. Give me the ability to speak, give me language and words, so that I might speak the truth of You.

But what is Yente supposed to say to that? Is that even the right question? Hayah ought instead to ask: Do you see, do you feel? How does it work, you moving rapidly as thought across the rippling ruffles of time?

What is the art of reading from books written by man when the whole world is a book written by God,

When the last spark of divine light returns to its source. 5₱4 Mwdsiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything in it will be opposite. Human bodies will be light a spirits, and new souls will come down into them, straight from the throne of the good agod himself. Then the need to eat and drink will vanish, sleep will become superfluous, and every desire will dissipate like smoke. Corporeal reproduction will give way to to the union of holy names. The Talmud will become covered in dust, completely forgotten and unnecessary. Everywhere will be bright from the glow of the Shekhinah.

"Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss," he said. "Remember your great misfortune, a woman. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you misled others. We all must do this, but women more so. Talmudists know about the strength of women, but they fear it, which is why they pierce girls' ears, to weaken them. But we don't. We don't do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play the fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma." 

And now, as Yente lies covered up to her neck in a Korolówka woodshed, she knows she has deceived them all.

The characters are speaking in different tongues: Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, in a local dialect of the Jews of Smyrna.

In the end. they speak a mixture, not worrying about the provenance of words; words are not nobility that want their genealogical trees retraced. Words are merchants, swift and useful, now here, now there.

What I liked most about it was that it was not important there whether we were mother or father, daughter or son, woman or man. There was no great difference between us. We were all just forms that took on light whenever it so much as glistened over matter.

Nahman's stories are not always to be believed-even less so when he writes them down. He has a propensity for exaggeration. He detects signs in everything; in everything, he seeks and finds connections. What happens is never quite enough for Nahman—he wants what happens also to have some heavenly, definitive meaning. He wants it to be meaningful, to have consequences for the future—wants even minor causes to provoke great effects. This is why he slumps so often into melancholy—has he not mentioned that himself?

The Books of Jacob quotes

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