The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Rapaport’s praise means more to Pinkas than any gold ingot. Every word the rabbi says Pinkas commits to memory, and in his mind he plays out any scenes of praise over and over. The rabbi never scolds. When he does not praise, he is silent, and his silence is heavy as a stone.

For the Holy Office in Rome they had to translate into Polish and Hebrew what this Zelig had managed to obtain on his mission, and also to translate into Latin and Hebrew what King Zygmunt III had written in the records of the royal crown in 1592.

God only gives us situations we couldn’t have come up with ourselves.)

And on the 10th of September, Hana and her husband, whom she has not seen in nearly two years, have intercourse in broad daylight, with the knowledge of everyone in the retinue. This happens in the tower, in the officer’s room, the little windows of which have been carefully covered so that no one else is able to take part in this tikkun, this act that repairs the world.

The women blush. The elder Wołowska, beautifully dressed, has twins who are one year old, whom she has left in the care of her sister in Warsaw; she would be happy to go back to them soon. She retreats one step, somewhat embarrassed. The virgins among them blush the most.

“I want the brothers who have wives who are not ours to cast those women aside and take new wives from among the true believers. And I want the women who married men who are not ours to take husbands from among our brothers. I want this to happen publicly. And if anyone asks you why, just tell them I commanded it.” “Jacob, that cannot happen,” says Wittel Matuszewska, shocked. “Those are bonded pairs. They can do a lot for you, but you can’t ask them to leave their wives and husbands.”

Jacob is a dick because the women dont want to sleep with his double penis.

When they lie down to sleep, she whimpers into her pillow. She turns to face Nahman, places his hand on her naked breast. “Sleep with me.” Nahman clears his throat and pats her head: “Don’t be afraid. He will give you strength and health and allow your body to get pregnant.” “I’m scared of him.”

Jacob's insistence on traumatizing the women by having sex with them is deeply annoying. Also, fuck you Nahman. Your wife is asking for your protection and you would rather throw her to wolves.

Jacob tells him to stay. He lies down on Wajgełe stiffly, with a grunt, and without looking at her, he does his thing. Wajgełe releases a deep sigh.

“Where we’re going, there will be no laws, because laws are born of death, and we are connected with life. The evil force that created the cosmos can be cleared out only by the Virgin. A woman will overcome that force, because she is powerful.”

Hayim, dressed like a Turk, is friendly and sincere. His smile never leaves his face, as if he were trying to conquer them all with it. He has obviously been raised with much love, for he is self-confident but not haughty.

The Shekhinah can only be found in a country where honor is paid to the female, and so it is in Poland, they not only stand before their women with their heads uncovered, but they also pay them compliments, and they act like servants toward them, and on top of all of that, they pay the greatest tribute to this Virgin with her child here,

“Many have attempted to pound on the entrance to this place—all the patriarchs, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, all the great pillars of the world. Yet they couldn’t get it open. In the place where we are going, there is no death.

Jacob's messianic nonsense is so tiring.

That night, before their journey, the envoys—Wołowski, Jakubowski, and Pawłowski—have intercourse with Hana. In this way they all become Jacob’s brothers, closer than they have ever been before.

These "messiah's" are disgusting.

From our birth, everything—the church, the home, our education, our customs and loves—bids us form an attachment to life. But no one ever tells us that the more attached we are to it, the more pain we’ll suffer later, once we have come by our final awareness.

She does not even try to pray, the words of prayer exhaust her, as if she were pouring out something that is empty into something that is void, grinding the same grain over and over, infected with ergot, poisoned through and through.

So I answer myself that the Lord God wants to punish us by means of creation itself: us, His creations, who sin with creation. He washes His hands of it, however, in order to preserve His goodness in our eyes.

“But why are they so determined not to give rights to religious dissenters?” asks Moliwda, as the wheels return to their soft, muddy ruts. “What do you mean, why?” Moliwda’s brother cannot comprehend this question. After all, it is crystal clear that salvation can come only through the Holy Roman Church. Wanting leniency for Lutherans or Jews or Aryans is regular devilry. And why should Russia be interfering in their affairs?

anxious crowds gather along the street. Everyone continues to be shocked and outraged. Gestures have grown bolder, words higher-flying: God, the Republic, victim, death, honor, heart

And the play is about trade. About the market that is the world. People invest in goods, in all variety of matter, and in all its variations—possessions, power that will bring earnings and offer confidence, pleasures for the body, valuable objects that beyond their price are totally useless, food and drink, intercourse. In other words, in everything that ordinary people understand as life.

Everything Tsarina Catherine might say is treated in advance as an attack on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and yet you hardly need any special powers of discernment in order to see that such is the spirit of the times—rights for other denominations, for example.

where in addition to the trees white stones grow. They grow slowly, but with time, as the earth gets older, they will come out onto the surface completely, the soil won’t be necessary anymore, since there will be no people, and all that will remain will be just those white rocks, and then it will turn out that they are the bones of the earth.

It could be said that all the maps of the world are moving around over him, making a rustling sound, turning around, accommodating one another.

Two women stay the night with him, while he tells the rest who live in the town that the two Matuszewskis and Pawłowski are to have intercourse with Henrykowa Wołowska. It is similar the following night: with Sofia Jakubowska are to be Pawłowski, both Wołowskis, Dembowski, and also Jasskier.

I genuinely hate Jacob now. This man is nothing but obsessed with impregnation and as seeing women as uteri.

He also brings back the ban on going into town, although as tends to be the case with bans, this one crumbles with the passage of time and the giving of generous gifts.

Now every day the news is worse. And every day more people come to the Jasna Góra Virgin, believing that in her presence nothing terrible can happen to them. The chapel is full, people lie in the form of the cross on the cold floor, the air is thick with prayer. When the songs fall silent, from afar, from just past the horizon, comes the low, ominous thunder of explosions.

Other officers have been invited, somewhat excited by the presence of such a lovely—if shy and quiet—young woman, and they show off their wit and their intelligence. The wine is good, and the scrawny chickens taste like wildfowl.

This captain, who is slender, fair-haired, and winsomely polite, asks Jacob in great confidence what he is to do, for he is young, and he is scared of death.

“War is a jumble between marketplace and nightmare,” Jacob Frank tells him. “Throw around those securities, buy your way out of the front line, pay bribes so you eat well—respect yourself, that’s how you’ll fend off death. It’s no kind of heroism to let yourself get killed.”

Jacob, our Lord, says: “Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.” And so we did. We became other people, and we left Częstochowa, at once the lightest and the darkest place.

Yente understands from this that behind passports lurks the great cosmos of the state apparatus,

It is a sensitive and vigilant system, propelled by hundreds or thousands of clerical desks and piles of papers that are propagated through the caress of the sharp ends of geese feathers and passed from hand to hand, from desk to desk; sheets of paper create a slight motion of the air that might be imperceptible compared with autumn winds, yet significant on a world scale.

Sheyndel is a beautiful woman, well-dressed, confident in herself and the strength of the charm she exerts on all around her. Soon her voice alone will be audible inside the house.

There are some people with whom you have a little problem from the start because you feel too attracted to them—you like them without any justification, even as you feel certain that it is all a simulacrum, a game.

yes, this is him, this once-uncertain, partial existence, a gelatinous orb of potential, a being who is and is not at the same time, for the description of which no language has yet been invented, nor theorized by any Newton. But from where she is, Yente sees both his beginning and his end. It isn’t good to know so much.

Then again, no one who has not yet passed their twenty-fifth year can be denied at least a little beauty, and so it is with Moshe—he is simultaneously slender and solidly built.

Moshe seems to admire Jacob while simultaneously not caring for him at all. This is often how he feels about people: immoderate and ambivalent.

The Lord does not permit spouses to live together. He is the one who determines who will be with whom, and the truth is there have never been any disagreements on this score.

And now, with this staff, he goes over the girls’ shoulders and chests, prying the hooks of their corsets with it, scratching their necks. “Please remove your frippery. Halfway.”

Jacob turns to him, pleased with himself, smiling. “You know I never do anything without a reason. I had them debase themselves in front of everyone for the simple reason that when my time comes, I will elevate them, lift them up above all other girls. Tell them that from me, so they will know it.”

What an asshole.

couldn’t feel at home in Brünn, and slowly I started to become aware that I was getting older, and that all these novelties had ceased to appeal to me, and that, having been brought up in Busk in poverty, I would never grow accustomed to such riches.

his stomach and in general greatly interfered with his health, which surprised me, for he always used to be as if he didn’t have a body at all.

“Is this what you are, Jacob?” I asked him one day, pretending I had had too much to drink, but in fact extremely alert to how he would respond. He seemed embarrassed. But then I thought that one would be a fool to expect people to remain as they once were, and that it is a kind of o’erpridefulness in us to treat ourselves as constant wholes, as if we were always the same person, for we are not.

Who could resist this young man who has a hundred ideas a second, and who works faster than anybody else? thinks Eva.

He has taught her one thing by day, however, and something else by night. Sometimes night breaks forth in the middle of the day, and then her submissiveness attracts him. A slight trembling of her eyelids, her beautiful, completely dark eyes, so dark that when they reflect the light, it looks like they are covered in glistening icing.

His girlfriends say that he is not very present in bed, and he finishes quickly. He reads a great deal. He corresponds with the Prussian Frederick, whom deep down he admires.

She is petite, and in the future, like all women from the east, she will be plump; she has now reached full bloom.

These are people from everywhere and nowhere. The future of humanity.

had her get completely naked. This time he didn’t touch her.

Gross. Jacob touches his naked daughter.

“And you, too, Miss Eva, must be a great Kabbalist. Look at what you do to me.” The emperor indicates his rising member. “Yes, that is my magic at work.”

“If a machine is capable of doing what man can do, and even doing it better than man, then what is man?”