The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

“God created man with eyes in the front, not the back of the head, and that means we’ve got to think about what’s to come, not what has been.”

I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain.

He looks you straight in the eye, says a sentence like he’s firing a shot, and then waits for a reaction.

Deep in the pocket of his white wool overcoat that he bought at the bazaar in Nikopol, he has a clump of fragrant resin.

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.

They treat him as the competition, like someone who brazenly set up a salvation stall right next to theirs, that is just like theirs but with better prices.

There isn’t room in Salonika for two contenders for Messiah.

“That’s the alef. The cross is the alef.”

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.

Breaking the old laws is necessary, is the only thing that will hasten the arrival of salvation.

The progress of salvation depends upon extracting from those religions the seeds of revelation and sowing them in one great divine revelation, the Torah of Atzilut: Torah of the World of Emanations. In this religion of the end of days, all three religions will be braided into one.

The one who arrives is a false Messiah. The Messiah is the one who never arrives. That’s the whole point.

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.

“Just as we have the catechism, so, too, do they have the Talmud. It is, to put it succinctly, a commentary on the Bible, but a specific one that has to do with how to observe the Mosaic laws and commands.”

“The Zohar is also a commentary, another kind of commentary, I would say, mystical, not having to do with the law, but rather with questions of how the world came into being, of God Himself . .

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.

With us, everything is somehow lighter, as though more conventional, sketched in an elegant hand, thinks the bishop—delicate, meaningful. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal.

Those who were only recently considered wretched, sinful, and accursed have now become legislators and enforcers. And vice versa, those who formerly judged and instructed now find themselves judged and instructed.

“Every letter has its numerical equivalent. Aleph is one, bet two, gimel three, and so on. That means that every word made up of letters also renders a number.”

“Words with the same numerical values are tied to one another by some deep meaning, even if on the surface it seems there is no connection between them. You can count with words, perform arithmetic with them, and all kinds of interesting things can happen.”

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.

“Truth for truth’s sake is not worth looking into. The truth in itself is always complicated. What we want to know is what truth we can use, and how.”

“Jacob is a con man,” Moliwda says provocatively, but Nahman acts as though he hasn’t heard.

The struggle is about leaving behind that point where we divide everything into evil and good, light and darkness, getting rid of all those foolish divisions and from there starting a new order all over again.

When Moliwda looks at Nahman, this small, freckled man who speaks so quickly that he starts to stutter, it surprises him that such a great intelligence would be used for the plumbing of such wholly useless depths.

Descartes could just as soon be a kind of paper cartridge, as far as he’s concerned. And still, Nahman moves Moliwda. Does he know anyone more zealous and more naive than this rabbi of Busk, Nahman Shmulewicz, Nahman ben Samuel?

It’s hard to grasp what’s going on when you are reading Polish. As a language, it’s quite strange.

A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist.

If you want to rid the world of someone, it does not take fire and sword, nor any type of violence. You just have to pass over that person in silence and never call him by name. In this way, he will gradually recede into oblivion.

A person who is a stranger gains a new point of view, becomes, whether he likes it or not, a particular type of sage. Who was it who convinced us that being comfortable and familiar was so great?

When I write, every detail sends me back to another, and then the next one again to something else, to some sign or gesture, so that I must always make a decision about what direction to pursue, in telling this story, where to fix my internal gaze, that same powerful sense that is able to summon back past images.

And now those crossroads are before my eyes, those bifurcating paths, of which one, the simplest one, the middle path, is for fools, while the other, to the right, is for the overconfident, and then there is the third path, which is for the brave, the desperadoes, even—that one will be full of traps, potholes, hexes, and calamitous occurrences.

naively forget about all the complications of what I am describing, trusting in the so-called facts, the events as I would narrate them to myself, as if my eyes were the only ones to perceive them, as if there were no hesitation or uncertainty in existence, and things were as they appeared to be

I describe a place as if others would have experienced it as I did, as if that were the way

it was. I trust my memory, and in recording what comes out of it, I make that frail instrument into a hammer that is to forge a bell. Going down that path, I believe that what I describe really happened, and that it happened that way once and for all. I even believe that there was never any chance of anything else having happened instead.

blow on my own fire and thereby ignite the embers of my self, about which I ought to forget, the ashes of which I should rather scatter to the wind—but instead I feed it until it is a gigantic flame.

The path to the left is only for those who have shown they deserve it, those who understand what Reb Mordke always said—that the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world.

Who would Jacob become if the game let him win here? He’d turn into one of those self-assured, arrogant people who go

for ostentatious pleasure rides through the streets of this northern city in their carriages. He’d live like they do, emptily and sluggishly. The spirit would leave him in shame, not as it entered him, but with a disappointed sigh. Or it would slip out of his body like a fart or a belch. Jacob, my beloved Jacob, would become a piteous convert, and in the end, his children would be able to pay their way into their noble titles. The entire path we’ve traveled up till now would lose its reason and its meaning.

I actually even felt cheerful to be attending such a ceremonious occasion, since I knew from the very beginning, when I thought of this plan, that I was doing the right thing, and that I was doing it for Jacob, even if he would curse me for it, even if he never let me see him again.

For it seemed to me that sudden esteem had altered Jacob beyond recognition, that he had started to care much more about his clothing and his carriage than he did about the great idea he had to convey to others.

The change took place after he started seeing bishops and bargaining with them with Moliwda’s help. It was like doing trade, like in Craiova at the office, as in Izmir, when he went around with a pearl or a precious stone to a meeting in order to sell

There he would sit at a table, and he would take the jewel out of its silk pouch, place it on a piece of cloth, having also set up the candles to put it in the best possible light, and in that way the beauty of the merchandise came out. And here we were the merchandise.

I walked down those streets and had the impression that everything was looking at me, and I knew that I would have to do what I had planned in order to save not only Jacob, but all of us, and our road to salvation, since here, in this flat country, it had begun to twist and turn in disturbing ways, to turn back on itself and to mislead.

The motion of the wheels transfers power to the stone gears that grind the grain. Everything that falls into them will be crushed into dust.

The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists.

The bans have little effect. They only work at the start, but then human nature with its long finger begins to poke a hole in them, first a little one and then, when it encounters no resistance, a larger and larger one. Until finally the hole is bigger than what isn’t the hole. That’s how it goes with any interdiction.

Jasna Góra Virgin