The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

paupers and mendicants, the kind who will never have a place to hang their hats. Sick and broken people desperate for some small miracle, though desirous still of scandal and sensation.

There is nothing that brings greater relief than the certainty that there is someone who really knows. For we ordinary people never have such certainty.

he shouts down something in Ladino, and Jacob answers, and for a minute they converse. Nahman glances inquiringly at Isohar, who knows this ancient language of the Jews of Spain.

Salonika is filled at this time with every sort of mage and miracle-worker, and there is some self-proclaimed Messiah or dark sorcerer offering instruction on every street corner.

For we understood that the Spirit had descended amongst us. The curtains between this and that world had been rent, time had lost its purity, the spirit was forcing its way into us like a battering ram.

He is not to rise or touch anything, instead he must speak right away, straight out of sleep, as though bringing news from those worlds, greater, more distant, closer to the light.

even if one of them has gotten himself a scarf or a better coat, Rohatyn still leers out from under it, or Dawidów, or Czernowitz. Even when, to protect against the sun, he wraps his head in a turban, Podhajce and Buczacz still jut out from under his pant legs, Lwów from his pockets, and his slippers, seemingly Greek, still clap as though stepping straight out of Busk.

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

“In our country, even a foreigner can find support.”

“So what did you come wandering in here for, leaving behind that magnificent country, since things were going so well for you there?”

the smells of the world awoke: orange flowers, smoke, ash, and yesterday’s rotting remains tossed out onto the streets. 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 work.

The water was worse than a robber—it washed out all the loot from below the deck and also took one deckhand who was drunk and barely able to stay on his feet. The loss of this man to the depths caused Nahman to completely lose control of himself. He jabbered incoherent words of prayer, tears as salty as the seawater blinding his eyes.

He had aged a great deal of late, as though he were traveling faster than the rest of us,

We certainly did not resemble what we were—messengers of some significant matter—but had rather the appearance of ordinary merchants circling around and around like ants.

So it is: our parents remind us of what we like least about ourselves, and in their growing old we see our many sins, I thought, but perhaps this was something more—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.

“But what do I get out of your telling me stories about some heavenly fair?” Leyb responded. “What do I care for this wisdom of yours, when I’m just curious how it’s supposed to be benefiting me? How much longer will I have to live like this, alone, in pain, in sorrow? What is God prepared to do for us, tell me of that.” Then he added: “I no longer believe that anything will change.

Nahman’s stories are not always to be believed—even less so when he writes them down. He has a propensity for exaggeration. He detects signs in everything; in everything, he seeks and finds connections. What happens is never quite enough for Nahman—he wants what happens also to have some heavenly, definitive meaning. He wants it to be meaningful, to have consequences for the future—wants even minor causes to provoke great effects. This is why he slumps so often into melancholy—has

She watches them scribble inept reports on dirty roadhouse tabletops, entrusting them to messengers who will carry them to Kamieniec and Lwów. There they are transformed in chancelleries, taking on a more refined character, becoming disquisitions, rubrics of events; they wind up on better paper and earn seals—and so, as official dispatches, they go by post to Warsaw, to the tired clerks of that collapsing state,

who send each other frequent messages riddled with insinuations and vague hints, as this whole shameful matter is difficult to express in straightforward holy Hebrew words. Finally, they’re read by officials in Turkey, who need to know what’s happening in this neighboring country, especially since they’re in business with its noblemen.

And if it becomes necessary to convert to another religion, they will follow Jacob in this. They are like soldiers,

Israel thinks about this all afternoon. Since the long-awaited, much-anticipated messianic times have dawned, Jacob is right: the laws of this world—the laws of the Torah—cannot be in effect anymore. Now everything is the other way around. But this idea fills Israel with fear. He sits on a bench and watches with his mouth open as the world is utterly transformed.

The progress of salvation depends upon extracting from those religions the seeds of revelation and sowing them in one great divine revelation,

In this religion of the end of days, all three religions will be braided into one.

not alone, of course, for in Sabbatian homes a particular type of hospitality is practiced. To keep Jacob warm, Moshe from Podhajce sends his youngest daughter for the night.

People are poor here, and because they’re poor, they’ve grown suspicious. The poor can’t afford to place too much confidence in anyone. Before the fat man gets skinny, the skinny man will croak, as the saying goes around these parts.

tiny little windows get white with steam, which the frost instantly transforms into filigreed palm trees.

When it’s over, Shlomo, in accordance with the ancient law, dispatches Zytla to Jacob’s bed. But Jacob is so tired that Zytla, wearing her good nightgown, clean and scented, feeling angry and rejected, has no choice but to go back to her husband.

Jacob is passed from one village to the next like a bizarre and holy wonder.

The rich and the satisfied are in no hurry for the Messiah; the Messiah is, after all, the one on whom the world must wait forever. The one who arrives is a false Messiah. The Messiah is the one who never arrives. That’s the whole point.

It is a question of uniting the three religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

At around noon, the idea seems shameful. By the afternoon, it’s up for discussion. By evening it’s been assimilated, and late at night it’s perfectly obvious that everything’s exactly as Jacob says.

In the prayer, Hebrew words intermingle with Spanish, Aramaic, and Portuguese, so that no one can understand exactly what is being said, which makes it sound all the more mysterious.

God is thus the frame of every journey. Man provides its contents.

The whole world is the enemy of the true God, don’t you know that?

so, too, have we now replaced the Torah with a woman. Since then she has come naked every evening, with no concealment, here among us. Women are the greatest mystery, and here, in the lower world, they are the Holy Torah’s counterpart. We will join with her, gently at first, with just our lips, with a movement of the mouth that pronounces the word that is read and in so doing re-creates the world from nothing every day.

When he does sit down to write, Nahman divides things into what can be written and what cannot. He must be careful to remember this. Especially since Jacob always says: No traces, keep everything a perfect secret, no one can find out who we are and what we do.

You have to close your eyes, and you have to go into the darkness, because it’s only out of the darkness that you see clearly, Nahman thinks to himself, taking Hayah’s breast into his mouth.

Their righteous indignation, Jewish and Christian, brings to their minds unquiet images of some great sacrilege, a pervasive, extra-denominational blasphemy.

Her beauty is a concern, though it’s a trait that often pleases parents.

An educated woman is the cause of many misfortunes.

Yet they did not take her for a traveling whore. She spoke good Polish and was obviously well-educated and well-mannered. She said she wanted to go to Kraków. She was attired nicely, too—in the finest dresses—and she behaved as if she were waiting for someone.

Pinkas feels flushed, as if a thousand infernal white-hot needles pierced his skin.

Sometimes he gives in to corporeal desire, but it must be acknowledged that he puts up a valiant struggle, and, whenever it gets the better of him, he quickly leaves the incident behind and never returns to it in his mind. Sins get stronger when you think about them, when you fret about them and revisit their unfolding—when you give in to despair. And the instructions are clear: Do your penance and move on.

“I think they want to show us that they do not want anything to do with those heretics.”

The bishop has had enough problems with the local Jews. What an infernal tribe, insidious and insistent—whenever you throw them out, they come slinking back around the edges, so there’s nothing you can do about them short of something decisive, irreversible. Nothing else helps.

In order for bread to make it to the breakfast table, a million things must happen first, and I must personally ensure they happen, often in cooperation with many other people, most of them women. Women are the ones who operate the querns, the spinning wheels, the looms.

For three of any home’s quoins rest upon the woman of the house, and the fourth upon God.

have two daughters, as you know, and one of them has so taken to giving birth that she has now produced a fourth little girl.

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.

All this mortal Loving is valued too highly, and it sometimes seems to me that when People do attend to it, what they really mean is Something else, that this “Love” of which they speak is some Kind of Metaphor, the which I simply cannot grasp.