The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Asher has learned that people have a powerful need to feel superior to others. It doesn’t matter who they are—they have to find someone who’s beneath them.

Isn’t this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn’t this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are? Amazingly, even those who seem to be the worst-off take, in their humiliation, a perverse satisfaction in the fact that no one has it worse than they do. Thus they have still, in some sense, won.

“And the child? Whose is that?” Asher finally ventured to inquire. She shrugged, which gave him some relief; he prefers silence to lies.

Your Benevolent Excellency, please hear out your faithful Servant, who is not only the truest Daughter of our Most Holy Church, but also your Friend, in whom you shall always find Succor, even in Moments so terrible as this.

Wherever I go, and whatever I say on this Question, I instantly hit a Wall of Indifference.

But it did sow some Anxiety within me to think that over our Heads some cosmic Wars are being waged by all Kinds of Forces flying around, swirling like Clouds, while we, so fragile and so blithe, are simply unaware.

It is quite vexing that the bishop died at such an awkward time.

believe that to express in language the vastness of the world, it is impossible to use words that are too transparent, too unambiguous—that

But it does occur to me that you seek only the counsel of the dead. Your citations and compilations are a way of rummaging around in tombs. Yet facts in isolation soon become unimportant, lose their relevance. Can our lives be described beyond fact? Can there be a description that is based exclusively on what we see and feel, on details, on sentiment?

I had a Kind of Intimacy with him that can only be shared by two Servants of the Church.

it is a great underground alef, a seal, the first letter upon which the world rests. Maybe somewhere far away in the world under the earth there are also other letters, a whole alphabet, made out of nothing,

It is said in Berachot 54 that there are four who should give thanks to God: he who has emerged unscathed from a voyage at sea; he who has returned from a journey through the desert; the sick man who has been healed; and the prisoner freed from jail.

I have no real tolerance for violence, and I fear pain. I studied to be a rabbi, not to go to war.

Reb Mordke always said to pay attention to dreams that frequently repeat, for they are our link with infinity.

In my dream, there are only rotted labyrinths with no exit.

I could have taught Leah to read, I could have built us a home and gone into business so that she would not have to work as a servant, but—this is the truth that burdens me with unrelenting guilt—having taken her for a wife, I neglected her completely.

no doubt seeking the same thing that I obtained there in my youth—the wisdom to be able to bear my suffering.

I envied them that they might ceaselessly immerse themselves in matters of the divine,

In Międzybóż it was taught that in every person there is something good, even in those who strike you as the basest of villains. I started to understand that everyone has their own self-interest to protect, and that it is by this that they are guided, and that self-interest is no failing.

If you think you are capable of destruction, think how you could build.

tended by the serving girls, from whom we could scarcely look away, especially Hayim, who liked women above all else.

must confess that when I lay my head against my pillow, before I fell asleep, the image of my wife came back to me, and I was overcome by terrible grief, for my wife was now growing old alone, working hard, ruined, and eternally sad, felled by the hardships of this world. I was reminded of all the people suffering, and all the animals, until an internal sob tugged at my heart, and I began to pray feverishly for the end of this world, in which people merely lie in wait for one another to kill and steal and demean and do harm.

Open my calamitous mouth, make my tongue be bright,

It occurred to me that God was giving me an example: an idea can arrive seemingly out of nowhere. It has its own schedule, advances at its own pace. Nothing can be rushed or bypassed. I crushed the grapes in my fingers and thought how much God had done in this time, letting the vineyards ripen, growing the vegetables in the ground and the fruits on the trees.

The villages here appear miserable, their homes made out of clay, with nets hung up to dry alongside. Their inhabitants are small and swarthy, and the women will gladly read one’s palms.

I do believe that everyone can tell what kind of person he truly is. It is just that deep down, he doesn’t want to find out.

come once more to his mind . . . The priest has always had a bit of a problem with hell. He could never quite believe in its existence, and the terrifying images he has seen in books—there have been a good number of them—haven’t helped.

He starts to tell his story in a low voice, in a monotone, as if he had repeated the tale in his head for so long that he’d learned it by heart. Now he gives it to the priest like a handful of coins in exchange for his hospitality.

The peasants put pegs into the crosses, one for each year of their release from serfdom. Then each year they take one out, until one day the cross stands bare—then, in return for those few years of freedom, they have to pay dearly with their own slavery, and that of their entire family as well.

“I am the one who attends to our extensive holdings, I oversee all our bills, all the gossip in society, all the correspondence—my husband does not have the inclination for it,” she says, as though reading his mind, and Moliwda raises his eyebrows in surprise. “I keep up with the family finances, I make matches, I deliver information, I make agreements, arrangements, I issue reminders

“Her Ladyship, my wife, is a veritable institution unto herself. The envy of the royal secretariat,” he says delightedly. “She is even an expert in my blood relations, making great endeavors on behalf of my kin.”

Moliwda knows that despite appearances, it is a happy marriage. Meaning: They each do their own thing.

people are living in poverty and humiliation and they are seeking a way out before they are all turned into animals. The religion of the Jews is close to ours, just like the Muslim religion, they’re all the same little pieces of the puzzle, you just have to know how to put them all together. They are assiduous in their religion. They seek God with their hearts, they fight for Him, not like us, with our Hail Marys and our prostration.”

The land they ought to receive from those of us who have too much of it—”

I am off to the kennel. Femka is to whelp. She slutted about with that priest’s dog with the long, messy fur, and now we’re going to have to drown the pups . . .”

Poland is a country where freedom of religion and religious hatreds meet on equal terms. On the one hand, Jews can practice their religion as they wish here, they have civil liberties and their own judiciary. On the other, hatred toward them is so great that the very word ‘Jew’ is derogatory, and good Christians employ it as a curse.”

“We all want that to be the explanation. It’s easier to be stupid and lazy than evil.

“It matters that you are all after money—you heretics.” “There are many roads to God, it isn’t ours to judge.”

Above all, he is amazed by the grayness of the landscape and the distant horizon.

These are the freemen and vagabonds Nahman told Moliwda about, many of whom have come to join the true believers. But Moliwda can see that these untethered people aren’t only Jews, as he had thought until now—as a matter of fact, Jews are in the minority here.

These are wanderers, frolicsome bandits, fugitives of every sort you can imagine.

But from the height of his horse’s back, Moliwda looks upon them with sympathy and thinks that the majority of these people are in fact the kind who do dream of having their own bed, their own bowl to eat from, and a regular, settled life, but that just isn’t how the cards have played out for them, so instead they’ve had to roam. He knows because his fate has been the same.

Their language is bizarre, and sometimes it is impossible to understand them, but the language of coins is universal.

She must be a woman with considerable know-how—she’d be able to stem blood flow, and help deliver children, but if you paid her enough, she could get rid of a pregnancy, too. She keeps quiet all these things she knows, which is no surprise.

for when a girl is pretty and young, or even just young, men immediately seize on to her, and as soon as they have seized, the girls may as well already be practicing the oldest profession in the world.

After so many years, Moliwda’s brother feels like a stranger, as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper, scarcely even real.

In fact, everyone in Warsaw strikes Moliwda as self-obsessed and vain. Everyone here pretends to be something they’re not. The very city tries to pass itself off as something else, somewhere more populated, more extensive, prettier, when in fact it’s just a plain old dump with muddy little roads.

“What a shame that everything must be written in French now,

“. . . the words are all so sorry.” Kossakowska finishes the popular Polish phrase on his behalf. “As though one’s throat were all dried out from speaking it.”

The Hebrew word d-a-m”—the bishop now traces the Hebrew signs on the table with his finger—“means at once ‘money’ and ‘blood,’ which might lead to any variety of misrepresentation—when we say that the Jews lust after money, it seems that we are saying they lust after blood. And to this was added the popular fantasy that it was Christian blood.