The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

name we use as if it were a paint to coat completely distinct experiences in order to communicate, when in reality every one of us is viewing something different? Is there not some way this can be verified? And what would happen if we were to really open our eyes? If we were to see by some miracle the reality that surrounds us? What might that be like?

Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick. Then, like an enormous, omnisensitive oyster, his body—so naked and delicate—feels the slightest tremble in the particles of light, scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world.

Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something,

took in that strange knowledge, kept in secret, that prayer and meditation alone cannot save the world, much though it may have been attempted.

son. So he determines to move on. This makes sense: prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some

soon you will read a whole sentence. What is the art of reading from books written by man when the whole world is a book written by God, even the clay path that leads up to the river. Look at it. The goose feathers, too, the dried rings of the wood of the fence boards, the cracks in the clay of the houses’ walls—that is exactly like the letter shin. You know how to read, so

No one is bad, no murderer can be condemned, because it is all part of a larger plan.

Jacob also dreams of divine palaces. He has been where the First is. He has seen that same door. He has gone after him. He has walked the same path.

I have often thought about how success and good fortune can suddenly transform into misery and humiliation.

And incense, and donkey excrement. I felt unimaginable happiness overflowing in me—it was a miracle, and a sign that every day the world arises anew and gives us a new chance for tikkun. It gives itself over into our hands trustfully, like an enormous and uncertain animal, crippled and dependent on our will. And we must harness it to our

sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet

in life in order to remedy this hostility. But it doesn’t always work. “Everyone around

one who arrives is a false Messiah. The Messiah is the one who never arrives. That’s the whole point.

Why is it, for instance, that some have such an excess in life, while others such a lack? And not only of material goods, but also of activities, time, luck, or health. If only everything could be divided evenly .