The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

the baker whose last name is Loaf, which always delights the vicar forane because it suggests a sort of hidden order that—were it more visible and consistent—might lead people to live more virtuous lives.

“Quelque chose de féminin, quelque chose de féminin,”

Something feminine, something feminine

Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.

Elisha Shorr is always unhappy. There is always something he is missing, something he misses—he wants what others have, or the opposite, he has something others don’t, and he considers it useless. This makes him a bitter and dissatisfied man.

this daily market square lament. And then there were complaints about the hierarchies of the gentry and the hostility of the peasants, which could truly poison life, not to mention the price of flour, the weather, a bridge destroyed by a flood, fruit rotting on the trees from excess moisture. And so, from childhood on, I, too, absorbed this eternal grudge against creation. Something is not right; there is some untruth afoot.

One winter night, however, I could not fall asleep and suddenly felt very strange. I had the overwhelming impression that everything around me was false, that it was artificial, as if the world had been painted by some skilled artist on canvases hung up all around. Or, to put it another way: as if everything around me had been made up, and by some miracle had taken the shape of reality.

it being written in the Book of Proverbs 25:16: “If you find honey, eat just enough—too much of it, and you will vomit.”

He considers that the farther south he goes, the weaker Christianity becomes, the stronger the sun, the sweeter the wine, the more Fatum there is—and the better his life gets. His decisions are not decisions, arriving instead from outside, having their proper place in the order of the world. And since it is this way, there is less responsibility, and therefore less of that internal shame, that unbearable feeling of guilt for everything he has done. Here every action can be corrected, you can have a chat with the gods, make them a sacrifice. That is why people are able to look at their reflections in the water with respect. And look upon others with love. No one is bad, no murderer can be condemned, because it is all part of a larger plan. That is why you can feel the same love for the executioner as you can for the condemned. People are gentle and good. The evil that happens comes not from them, but rather from the world. The world can be evil—and how!

The farther north you go, the more people concentrate on themselves, and in some sort of northern madness (no doubt due to the lack of sun) they ascribe to themselves too much. They make themselves responsible for their actions.

What remains is the conviction that destroys every person, supported by the Ruler of the North, the Church, and its ubiquitous functionaries, that all evil is in man yet can’t be fixed by man. It can only be forgiven.

But can it be forgiven? Hence comes that tiring, destructive feeling that one is always guilty, from birth, that one is stuck in sin and that everything is sin—doing something, not doing it, love, hate, words, and even thoughts. Knowledge is a sin, and ignorance is a sin.

Wherever there is God—the great God, the greatest God—there is neither sin nor any feeling of guilt. Only the little gods produce sin, similar to how dishonest craftsmen counterfeit coins.

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.

our parents remind us of what we like least about ourselves, and in their growing old we see our many sins,

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. They want miracles, signs, shooting stars, water become blood. They don’t completely understand what Yankiele Leybowicz, called Jacob Frank, is saying. But because he’s tall, handsome, and dressed like a Turk, he seems exceptional, and he makes a big impression.

Jacob heals people by placing his hands on their heads, and lost things are found, abscesses diminish, women achieve long-awaited pregnancies, and the love between husbands and wives is restored. Cows give birth to twins with strange colorations, while chickens lay unusual eggs with two or even three yolks.

The room falls silent, intrigued by the posing of such a stupid question.

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. Who is better and who is worse depends on a vast array of random traits. Those with light-colored eyes consider themselves to be above those with dark-colored eyes. The dark-eyed, meanwhile, look down on the light-eyed. Those who live near the forest’s edge feel superior to those living in the open on the ponds, and vice versa. The peasants feel superior to the Jews, and the Jews feel superior to the peasants. Townspeople think they’re better than the inhabitants of villages, and people from villages treat city people as though they were somehow worse.

When you live in a place and a time in which certain laws are in effect, then you must observe those laws, but never forgetting that they are only partial systems, never absolute. For the truth is something else, and if a person is not prepared to come to know it, then it may seem frightening and terrible, and that person may curse the day he learned of it. But 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.

it surprises him that such a great intelligence would be used for the plumbing of such wholly useless depths.

When I look at him, I see that there are people who are born with something that I cannot find the words for, something that means that others respect them and hold them in the highest esteem. I don’t know what it is—is it posture, is it a head held high, a penetrating gaze, a way of walking? Or maybe some spirit hovering around him? An angel who keeps him company? He has only to enter any space, be it the most decrepit shed or the holiest chamber, and all eyes turn to him at once, pleasure and appreciation on everyone’s face, although he has not yet done or said a thing.

Later he would tell us about Radziwiłł, saying he had imprisoned his wife and children for years, keeping them confined to a single chamber and subsisting on bread and water, until his relatives finally turned against him and convinced the king to treat him as a madman. That was why he was now under house arrest in Słuck. He supposedly had a whole harem made up of young girls who had been abducted or purchased from the Turks as slaves.

True

And in some sense, life is this constant loss. Improving one’s station, getting richer, is the greatest illusion. In reality, we are richest at the moment of our birth; after that, we begin to lose everything.

attention is inequitably distributed. Some people are spoken about a great deal, with myriad words pronounced about them. Of others, people utter not a single word, nary a syllable, ever. Those dead will flicker out after a while, moving away from the glass, disappearing somewhere into the back. There are a great many of that latter group, millions of them, completely forgotten. No one even knows they lived on earth. There is no trace of them, which is why they are freed faster, and depart. And maybe that’s a good thing.

(Pinkas is old enough to understand how it works: God only gives us situations we couldn’t have come up with ourselves.)

Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.

He, too, has the ever-increasing suspicion that they have wound up in a great theater that extends all across the city, where everyone plays the role in which they have been cast, yet without knowing the contents of the play they are performing, or its significance, or its end.

To be impatient means never really living, being always in the future, in what will happen, but which is after all not yet here. Do not impatient people resemble spirits who are never here in this place, and now, in this very moment, but rather sticking their heads out of life like those wanderers who supposedly, when they found themselves at the end of the world, just looked onward, beyond the horizon? What did they see there? What is it that an impatient person hopes to glimpse?

since the guillotine began its breakneck career.