On Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob

Light requires darkness

The Books of Jacob (2014) by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize winner. Recently, on a Monday afternoon, I felt that heavy, dulled, melancholic chill impervious to late-summer heat that marks the ending of a good book. I had psychically bonded with a character with a drawn-out death scene, contemplated the uselessness of suffering, strived and dived, and then emerged blurry-eyed into downtown New Haven. The book is quite good. It’s also very long at 1,000 pages. In emotional tone (Slavicity) and in ambition it echoes works like War and Peace, but with a much more contemporary relationship to social roles and the importance of daily life among the peasantry. The peasantry in this case—the Ashkenazim of the Galician and Podolian grasslands.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is its historical remit. One senses that the author would have written a conventional history if there had been enough footnoteable material to use. As it is, this historical fiction offers a great look into the borderlands between Eastern Poland (now Ukraine) and the former Ottoman Empire. Its protagonists are peoples not typically included in nationalist histories of Poland or Ukraine or Romania or Greece, the Jewish traders wending their way across the Bug and Prut and Danube to bring furs and wood and grain south, and textiles and tobacco and spices north.

This Jewish borderland, set on fire by religious upswell in the eighteenth century, birthed messianic heresies and charismatic revival movements, most inspired by the “False Messiah” of Smyrna, Shabbatai Zevi. One of these revivals remains with us today (Hassidism), but the others have died out through conversion to Islam (among the donme) or to Christianity (among the Frankists). It is this last group that provides the narrative focus of the book. This expanse of portrayal necessitates fiction; there’s no other way to pull it off with enough depth and truth.

The book starts with a wedding in the seemingly perennial Podolian atmospheric conditions of mud and smoke. The Frankist heresy kicks off among a group of merchants in Rohatyn who believe that Shabbatai Zevi was the first messiah, his son was the second, and now they wait for the third. The third messiah will bring together the sparks of light to reunite the sephirot, but in order to do that he will have to pass through the darkest filth—imprisonment, addiction, perversion, and Christianity—to free the sparks of light that are imprisoned there. The heresy acquires the name “anti-Talmudists” among the Polish Szlachta nobility that wants to convert the Jews to Catholicism and thus win renown for Poland. Once converted, the Frankists would finally have access to all the shards of light in order to free Shekhinah, the feminine principle of God, which they come to worship in the form of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

The narrative, told from the point-of-view of peasants and nobility both, undercuts many nationalist positions on the history of Western Ukraine. It successfully focuses on the non-majority peoples of the region: Jews and Armenians and Bogomils and the like. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is shown to be diverse and also governed ineffectively. Ruthenians/Ukrainians are hardly mentioned.

As the book continues, it moves West, from Kamianets to Lwow to Czestochowa to Brno to Vienna to Offenbach. As the action moves West, the book tracks more with an available historical record, concerning itself with the Enlightenment, Austrian court fashion, and the like. I do wish it remained in the East, trafficking goods and heresies between Podolia and Smyrna. This realm is more open to imagining and teaches the reader more. What else can be learned from another parable about Enlightenment and disappointment? The tale gets bogged down, loses speed, becomes…psychological.

That evening, Asher is overwhelmed by the melancholy of those days. He is irritated; he has a lemon balm infusion prepared. Suddenly it seems to him that aside from all those lofty theses printed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, beyond light and reason, beyond human power and freedom, there remains something very important, a kind of dark ground with the sticky consistency of cake batter onto which all words and ideas fall as though into tar, losing their shape and their meaning. The lofty tirades from the newspaper sound as if they had been spoken by a ventriloquist—indistinct and grotesque. From everywhere comes something like a chuckle; perhaps at one time Asher might have thought that it was the devil, but nowadays he doesn’t believe in such things. He remembers what Gitla said—a shadow, something well-lit casts a shadow. That is what is disturbing about this new idea. Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.

This author does indeed have a lot to teach. The book is solidly researched, with a ton of information about Kabbalah delivered, including the passage of light from East to West, attributed causally to Shabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam followed by Frank’s to Catholicism: humanity is ascending as the messiahs pass through the filth of the material world. There is much about the sephirot, the celestial spheres that shattered during creation, about the rhyme of meaning through the numerical resonances of Hebrew letters. Language itself is powerful here: curses are unleashed and cling to the body. What is the messianic fervor, the service to charismatic potential charlatans, all for?

People cried a great deal, for reasons that struck me as unclear, as they did not know the deceased, nor did they particularly understand who he had been. In the parish church, when the local bishop gave his sermon, the whole church was in tears, perhaps because the words “in vain” came up so many times in it, and together, those two words are likely even worse than “death.” I, too, cried, being in the grip of despair, in an eternal kind of woe, and it was only then that I was able to fully lament my little daughter, and all my dead.

I recall that Hershel was standing next to me and asked me what those Polish words meant, “in vain.” I told him, and he said, “They have a good sound.”

It’s when all your effort goes to waste, when you build on sand, when you try to collect water in a sieve, when you discover that your hard-earned money is counterfeit. All of that is in vain. That’s how I translated and explained it to him.

The answer is the same now as it was then: it is an attempt at freedom. By submitting to the authoritarian figure, he can free you from pain, from sadness, from worry, from death. Some of these effects are immediate, the loss of anxiety for example. But others are only hoped for. As the book winds on, Jacob Frank, the supposed messiah, is revealed to be mortal, weak, arrogant, crass, diseased, untrustworthy and, worst of all, tacky. Why do people stick with him? the reader wonders. Length is not the only Slavic trait possessed by the book; it also swims in that other Eastern poetic mode: celebration of the grand, beautiful, fully futile and idiotic gesture. Knowing full well that this attempt at freedom is likely doomed to failure and humiliation, is not the attempt itself, abandoning wisdom and propriety and all that came before, a moment of living free? Is it not worth it to grasp at it even for just one moment?

Then I also lost suddenly my greatest weakness, my sin—impatience. For what does it mean to be impatient? To be impatient means never really living, being always in the future, in what will happen, but which is after all not yet here. Do not impatient people resemble spirits who are never here in this place, and now, in this very moment, but rather sticking their heads out of life like those wanderers who supposedly, when they found themselves at the end of the world, just looked onward, beyond the horizon?

The end of the book is in an atmosphere of dissipation and disappointment. The main characters have died, some Enlightened, some wealthy, some broken. Life muddles ever onward. The history is lost and only fragments of the attempt at freedom remain. But the goal ultimately still drives history forward. The heretics’ hymn likely still starts internal fires today, with the caveat that we have transitioned from a religious messianism to a reason-based one, rendering the god part unseemly.

My soul
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.