The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft

The Books of Jacob

Or:

A fantastic Journey

Across Seven Borders,

five languages,

AND THREE MAJOR RELIGIONS,

not Counting the Minor Sects.

Told by the DEAD,

supplemented by the AUTHOR,

drawing from a Range of BOOKS,

and aided by IMAGINATION, the which

being the greatest natural GIFT of any person.

That the WISE may have it for

a record, that my compatriots REFLECT,

laypersons gain some UNDERSTANDING,

AND MELANCHOLY SOULS OBTAINS SOME SLIGHT ENJOYMENT.

by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft

The Books of Jacob is a fabulously told tale, based on the real figure of a mid-18th century Jewish mystic called Jacob Frank, who called himself the Messiah and tried to blend his Judaism with Islam and Christianity.

The huge amount of research Olga Tokarczuk obviously did for her magnum opus sits lightly in the text, as she leads the reader on to follow the wanderings of the Jews and other groups around the geographical area we now know as Ukraine and Poland.

It is not surprising the Polish writer won the Nobel prize for Literature in 2018 for this 1,000-page volume which is illustrated with maps, paintings, emblems, portraits, letters, ancient texts and so on to provide the visual material for this hefty text.

Tokarczuk explained, “The history of Jacob Frank is so astonishing that it’s hard to believe it really happened. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a large group of eighteenth-century Jews from Podolia [in what is now south-western Ukraine] ­– adherents of the teachings of the seventeenth-century Kabbalist, rabbi, and self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Tzvi ­— who became followers of Jacob Frank, a merchant who at some point had professed Islam and then commanded the group’s conversion, with great pomp, to Catholicism.”

You may have read Tokarczuk’s more accessible novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, which was described as “an astonishing amalgam of murder mystery, dark feminist comedy and paean to William Blake” (The Guardian 21-9-18). And let’s not forget, she was awarded the Man Booker prize in 2018 for her novel Flights.

If you take The Books of Jacob slowly, a few pages a day, you will get through it (eventually) and, at this pace, really have time to absorb the genius of Tokarczuk’s literary mind.