The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

“Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”

Eva could pass for an Italian or Spanish woman, and there isn’t any nation for her father, no specific place that could stake a claim on him. He is completely original. When the emperor puts some direct question to Jacob, he feels as if he’s coming up against the iron sides of the man’s will; he senses the incredibly powerful boundaries of his self. These are people from everywhere and nowhere. The future of humanity.

“Who are we now? Who am I now? I was a rabbi in Busk; things were going fine for me, but now there’s no way back, and I am bankrupt.”

The debate is about how to define this fashionable idea, intruding ever more frequently into ordinary conversations, of an “Enlightenment.” Everyone makes use of it as they can, but everyone also understands it somewhat differently. It started with a man named Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who, in one of his articles, defending the institution of church marriage, posed in a footnote the question: “Was ist Aufklärung?” This unexpectedly invited a flood of responses, including from famous people. Moses Mendelssohn was the first to respond to it, and with time an article on enlightenment was published in the journal by the well-known philosopher from Königsberg, Immanuel Kant.

When Ascherbach reads Mendelssohn, he feels, for the first time in his whole life, proud that he’s a Jew.

means spending all day in the office behind his shop, sitting and tallying

It is healthy to be a little cold when you know such heat is coming.

Eva knows that people can be divided into those who have horizontal wrinkles on their foreheads and those who have vertical ones. The former are cheerful and friendly—that’s how she thinks of them, anyway, and she herself is like this—but they rarely get what they want in life. The others, those with the furrows over their noses, are angry and impetuous, but they usually do succeed in attaining their goals. Jacob belongs to that second group. In his youth, those angry wrinkles were more visible, but now they, too, have receded; perhaps his aim has already been reached, and they no longer have any reason to be there. Only their shadow has remained on his forehead, rinsed away daily by the sun’s rays.

He says that he has taken upon himself all the anguish on the road to Daat—sacred knowledge, the sole road to salvation. Whoever travels on it will be freed from every pain and every plague.

The older the Lord gets, the more he likes his girls to be extremely young. He has them get undressed and lie beside him in bed, two at a time. At first they’re usually frightened, but then they quickly get used to it and begin to giggle. Sometimes the Lord makes jokes with them. The bodies of such young girls are reminiscent of parsley, long, delicate rootlets. Zwierzchowska doesn’t worry about their virtue. The potency of the Lord is now limited to speech. Somebody else will have to tire himself out over their virtue. They are there to keep the Lord warm.

David in old age emulation.

“From a persecuted victim you’ve come to be a tyrant, a rotten baron. You have become just like all those you used to stand against. In the place of that law that you rejected, you’ve introduced your own system that is even worse. You are pathetic, like a character in a comedy . . .”

“Well, I think,” says Dr. Reichelt, who was there during Jacob Frank’s illness, “that this entire messianic movement is a rather complicated form of extracting money from naive Jews.”

There is no final exhalation, Asher thinks with mounting rage, no soul that slips out of the body. Quite the contrary, the body sucks the soul inside it, so that it can carry it into the grave. He has seen this so many times, but only now has he fully comprehended it. Just like that. There is no final exhalation. There is no soul.

Our ancestors would always say how it is written in Pesachim 3: There are four types of money that never bring happiness: writers’ fees, translators’ fees, orphans’ benefits, and money coming from countries overseas.

And I reminded them that in the old language, do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical values? Or is after all written: alef-vav-resh: which is: 1+6+200=207. While Ein Sof—alef-yod-nun-samekh-vav-pe: which is: 1+10+50+60+6+80=207. But the word raz, or mystery, is also 207. Just look, I told them: all the books we have studied have been about light: the Sefer ha-Bahir is the Book of Brightness, Sha’are Ora are the Gates of Light, Meor Einayim the Light of the Eyes, the Orot ha-Kodesh is the Light of Holiness, and finally, the Sefer haZohar is the Book of Splendor. We have done nothing other than waking up at midnight, at the time of the greatest darkness, in our low, dark cubbyholes, in the cold, to study light.