"The Books of Jacob" by Olga Tokarczuk

This extravagant book has an extravagant subtitle: Or: A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, supplemented by the Author, drawing from a range of Books. and aided by Imagination, the which being the greatest natural Gift of any person. That the Wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots Reflect, laypersons gain some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.

Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

Lengthy, and freighted with endless details, Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob tells the story of the 18th-Century Messianic figure Jacob Frank. And it tells it with such scrupulous care that nothing of any bearing on the story is omitted. At 961 pages, and consisting of seven books within its covers, this is truly an epic effort on the parts of the author and her translator.

Jacob Frank was born Yankiele Leybowicz bar Yehuda in 1726, in western Ukraine, at a time when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. He fraternizes while in his 20s with a group of learned and disputatious rabbis. They congregate in the evenings and interrupt one another, raising their voices to try to gain ascendancy on the doctrinal or philosophical point at issue. During these disputes they try for eloquence and erudition, to out-speak and out-argue all others, vying for attention and victory in their endless debates. Never mind that they always focus on some minor, arcane prescriptive point in the Talmud or the Old Testament. From time to time these discourses actually bear on larger matters of legitimate human concern. Most of the time, not.

In this milieu, young Yankiele begins to have startling visions and to make enigmatic pronouncements on Hebrew beliefs, and uses his charisma and self-effacing approach to become the center of attention. His learning cannot match that of the rabbis, but his down-home observations and his magnetic personality win him a following. He espouses a schism from the Hebrew faith, a complete break, in which Moses is exposed as a fraud and his law repudiated. The group travels to Turkey, where Yankiele takes the name Jacob, and is given the surname Frank, which is the generic Ottoman term for a European.

He converts to Islam briefly while in Turkish territory but soon his sect gains notoriety as an anti-Talmudist group of Jews which seeks baptism into the Catholic faith. This gains them both friends and enemies in high places, and after nearly interminable machinations on all sides, Jacob is imprisoned in Częstochowa, and takes on an air of martyrdom.

Tokarczuk focuses her weighty narrative on Jacob’s family, his beliefs, his close associates, and the cause célèbre of this curious and unorthodox sect. She has done so much research that she admits she can’t include all the notes that would be necessary in such an exhaustive work. I do honor the labor because the characters always reflect the truth of human nature, which is an unerring focus throughout. Readers will get the real benefit of a deep insight into 18th-Century Europe, seen through the surprising superstitions of the time, which in large part flow from religious beliefs.

I wanted to read The Books of Jacob because of Tokarczuk’s 2017 novel Flights, and because (as I’ve seen written) it was a prime reason she won the 2018 Nobel Prize. It seems to me that Jacob is a stupendous achievement, and reflects the impressive energy and honorable motives of its author. It also confirms for me that the Nobel committee confers its Literature prize on writing hewing to a theme of outrage at human suffering, and the effects of intolerant societies.

If you wish to work through 961 pages based on these things, or it you have a particular interest in Jacob Frank, then take up The Books of Jacob.