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Who among you has ever truly believed in me? You are all fools. I’ve been struggling over you in vain.
Jezierzańska tries to extricate herself, but Jacob has caught her by the hand and is pulling her closer.
The same is true of his legs—now they’re almost bare. Even Jacob’s penis has changed. Jezierzańska would know, as she used to have dealings with it often, hosting it inside her. But it has been a long time since she saw it take its fighting stance. Now it looks more like a formless codpiece flopping between his legs, the effect exaggerated by the hernia.
“You go, Eva, to the younger women, pick three for me, you know the kind I like, tell them to ready a white costume and to keep it at hand. I’ll be calling them soon.” Eva Jezierzańska sighs theatrically and says in mock indignation: “Illness and old age just don’t exist as far as you’re concerned, Jacob. You ought to be ashamed.”
Jacob continues his habit of lying in the form of the cross before the altar, which has created quite the sensation among the Catholics of Bürgel; they are unfamiliar with such ostentatious eastern piety.
After obtaining a divorce, he married again, but that marriage, too, was not long for this world. He’s also had dalliances with men. To one of his male lovers he gifted a town and several villages, proving himself to be miserable marriage material.
He was in fact fighting on two fronts, battling the Polish army at the same time, and he indulged with great gusto in rape and plunder as well.
He drank, played cards, and was called a “libertine,” a fashionable recent word, even though for as long as possible he associated mostly with the ultra-Catholics.
The meticulously calculated sums were astronomical: two million, six hundred and ninety-nine thousand, two hundred and ninety-nine Polish zlotys.
Only bold, unusual ideas have any chance of coming to fruition—this he has been taught throughout his entire turbulent life. For Prince Lubomirski’s whole life has been made up of just such unusual decisions that the regular rabble could never possibly comprehend.
“No, thank you, there’s no need, we have our own doctors.” There is a moment of silence, as though everyone now needs to contemplate carefully all that Eva Frank has said—what “we” means, and the implications of “our own doctors.”
Eva finds herself sitting down at Mrs. von La Roche’s clavichord, her heart pounding, but of course she knows that her greatest talent is certainly not playing the clavichord, but rather keeping her feelings under control: “The lips won’t let themselves be fooled by the heart, nor will the body reveal what the heart feels,” a function of old lessons.
Where the father was dark-complexioned, skinny, violent, the son is a little overweight, calm, attentive.
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.
was hidden before you under this name of Jacob Frank, but that is not my true name. My country is very far from here, seven years’ trip by sea from Europe. My father was called Tygier, and my mother’s signet was a wolf. She was the daughter of a king . . .”
They are used to whatever Jacob says being the truth. The truth is like a gnarled tree, made up of many layers that are twisted all around each other, some layers holding others inside them, and sometimes being held. The truth is something that can be expressed in many tales, for it is like that garden the sages entered, in which each of them saw something else.
Is it about Jacob, that he is from a royal lineage, and he was given to the Jew Buchbinder to be raised in exchange for his son, also called Jacob, and that Buchbinder taught him the Jewish language—for show, to keep people at bay? Which is why his daughter Eva, Avacha—may her health be good—must only marry someone from a royal family, too.
And so Old Jezierzańska came in, replacing Jakubowski and Eva, sitting down on the edge of the bed and immediately understanding what it was he wanted. She laid his head on her lap, and he tried to put his lips in the position they might take for kissing, but failed on account of the paralyzed half of his face. She pulled out a large, flabby breast and pressed it to the Lord’s lips. And he sucked it, although it was empty. Then he lost the last of his strength and stopped breathing. He didn’t say a word.
With time, meanwhile—for time has a wonderful ability to efface all uncertain places and patch up all holes—the analysis achieves a certain consistency:
and terror has gripped him. She knows she is going to die, he thinks in horror, she knows her illness is incurable, and that nothing can be done. But she’s not expecting death—that is something else entirely. She knows it with her reason, she can say it in words, write it, but deep down her body, being the animal it is, has not believed it at all. In this sense, death doesn’t really exist, thinks Asher—no one has ever described the experience. It’s always someone else’s death, a stranger’s. There is no sense in being scared of it, since what we would be scared of is something other than what
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And she, being Gitla, assured, mobilizes within herself, and you might think that she was now taking this whole death business into her own hands, this problematic and irreversible process, as if it were merely the latest in the long list of tasks she has had to perform.
On Thursday afternoon at twenty past one, Gitla’s heart stops beating. She takes a last deep breath, and that breath stays inside her, filling her breasts. 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.
Is it true you all hold secret rendezvous, windows covered, weird rituals?” he asks captiously.
apart from the holy path that must be traveled by all true believers, there was also a certain practical reason: avoiding the army,
He doesn’t understand whether what they say here is to be taken literally or as metaphor.
Then Joseph goes with his peers into the city, and there they join in with the exotic, bored crowd of young people who have already occupied all the parks and squares and are either flirting with whoever is around or playing instruments.
“And these elders, they’re just funny, they repeat the same things over and over, and when you try and actually find something out, they hide behind some secret.
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.
what does it mean to be impatient? To be impatient means never really living, being always in the future, in what will happen, but which is after all not yet here.
To him, to Yeruhim, I also confessed about Hayah Shorr—that she was the one woman I was ever able to love, and that I had loved her from that beautiful moment when I was given her for one night, back when I had come with news of Jacob to Rohatyn. But above all, of course, it was Jacob I had loved.
Because it appealed to me to travel back, in memory, because the past remained alive for me, while the present was barely breathing, and the future lay before me like a cold corpse.
Our grandchildren cheer us up only until a certain time, when we become more sensitive to the affairs of the world, and we begin to mix up even our grandchildren’s names.
There are two varieties of it being impossible to know. The first variety is when someone does not even try to ask or investigate, considering that in any case he cannot learn anything in full. And the second is when a person does investigate and seek, and he comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to know completely.
He who reads those old books and observes those laws and customs, it is as if he’s always facing backward, and yet he must move forward. That is why he will stumble and ultimately fall.
Jacob Frank’s skull was removed from his grave, and, thoughtfully recorded as “a skull belonging to a Jewish patriarch,” it passed into the hands of the historian of the city of Offenbach. Many years later, under unknown circumstances, it made its way to Berlin, where it underwent detailed measurement and research and was labeled a prime example of Jewish racial inferiority.
If human beings had only known how to truly preserve their knowledge of the world, if they had just engraved it into rock, into crystals, into diamond, and in so doing, passed it on to their descendants, then perhaps the world would now look altogether otherwise. For what are we to do with such a brittle stuff as paper? What can come of writing books?
Jesus was better and more noble, in that he predicated his system upon reason. Unfortunately, his ideas got distorted, similarly to Muhammad’s. And yet the truth so effectively hidden by Moses could be reached by following the connections between seemingly disconnected domains—the hard sciences, the arts, alchemy, and Kabbalah—that in fact complement and comment upon each other. The book concluded in an elegy for Kant,
Yente is also able to espy a strange and significant thing: both branches of the family, having lost every trace of the memory of one another’s existence, produced poets.
“Madam, it is a novel. It is literature.” “What does that mean?” the pianist insisted. “Is it true or not?”
Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is”—he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips—“the perfection of imprecise forms.”
From where Yente is looking, there are no dates, and so there is nothing to mark with any celebration, nor any cause for alarm or concern.
Even when people completely stop being able to feel their presence, when they can no longer be reached by any sign from them, the dead still traverse this purgatory of memory. Deprived of human attention, they do not have places of their own, nor any sort of foothold.
And so, if Yente had ever professed any religion, after all the constructions her ancestors and her contemporaries had built up in her mind, her religion now is her faith in the Dead and their unfulfilled, imperfect, miscarried, or aborted efforts at repairing the world.
Yente transforms slowly into crystal and, in a few million more years, she will be a diamond. Meanwhile, her eyes are still moving, and a smile slowly spreads across her face, not directed at anybody now.
In April 1944, someone throws a bottle into the hole leading into the cave; inside the bottle is a piece of paper that says, in a clumsy hand, “Germans gone.”
Who might still know Yente’s name? Down below, she makes out a sitting figure, her face lit up by some white glow, hair peculiar, attire eccentric—yet nothing has surprised Yente in an awfully long time; she has lost that ability. She just watches letters appear out of nowhere from under this figure’s fingers on a bright flat rectangle of light, lining up obediently in little rows. The only thing Yente can think of that is like this is tracks in the snow—since the dead lose their ability to read, one of death’s most unfortunate consequences . . . And so poor Yente is unable to recognize her
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