One of the books that will be the reference of the year is coming, Jacob’s Books, written by Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, legendary with its narration, revolutionary with its style, confirming the fairness of the Nobel Prize. A monumental, monumental masterpiece with an original, magical, majestic narrative that spans a vast area, a passion for holism, a mastery of genres, and a wonderful flexibility to mix something connected with it without contaminating history. With great writers from Cervantes to García Márquez or Kafka. Jacob’s books are quite an intellectual challenge.
It is the same in terms of graphics, because the pages of the book, which is more than a thousand pages, are 1,064, just as the Jews would do. are numbered from the largest to the smallest starting from the page.
The value of the Nobel prize awarded to Olga Tokarczuk is, in addition to this wonderful novel, her more than three decades of literary practice, with twenty books published that have made her a reference writer and also a cult following in Poland and the United States. European countries and now the rest of the world.
In Jacob’s Books, Olga Tokarczuk takes us to a world that no longer exists, but is brought to life in an extraordinary way, with her detailed description of the daily lives of people of different social or economic status, different beliefs, and different life paths. life.
arbitrary limits
In the second half of the 18th century, in Poland, in the midst of wars, looting, pogroms, and divisions, a man emerged, a real and historical figure who brought the Jews out of their state of procrastination. He was supported by a few, a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand people, but he did something extraordinary with and for them: he guaranteed their safety and respect. Poland, as defined by Tokarczuk, is a multicultural, colorful country, not at all like a homogeneous nation, but a region with arbitrary borders, a prayerful society full of prejudices and superstitions. A society painfully divided between three religions and several different languages, completely deprived of its own national identity. This particular historical weight and historical significance of the story told in The Books of Jacob is extremely strong.
The protagonist is Jankel Lejbowicz, named Jacob Frank, which means “strange”, which is equivalent to being free. He was the great disciple of Shabtai Tzvi, who was declared the prophet of the Messiah. His doctrine is to violate the Law of Moses and apply it in reverse. When Orthodox Jews fast, you must eat; When the law says it’s time to grieve, these new Jews speak of being happy.
Jacob is beautiful. When the husbands of his clients’ beautiful wives are away, he goes to their homes, closes them, and pleases them. But he also invites his young assistant, Hershele, who pampers him with pleasure, to his bed.
From the Isochar school he received the teachings of his teachers Nachman Samuel ben Levi and reb Mordke.
The narrative recreates all the images that Jacob projects: a heretic, a mystic, a cabalist, a rabbi, a prophet and a messiah, the third and final divine messenger, according to his followers. He is also a religious reformer who set himself the goal of unifying the world’s three largest religions. He embodied the cross-cultural archetype of the holy man who is in direct contact with the divine and not subject to social laws. Not subject to the law, even that of Moses. Jacob Frank, the protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, was a clever impostor but also a talented politician, a man who led a large group of Polish Jews to baptize them in 1759. Then came the time when, after being imprisoned in Czestochowa, where he spent 13 years in prison, he felt defeated and incorporated a female deity, the female Christ figure, into his doctrine. He saw the incarnation of the Jewish Shechina in Our Lady of Czestochowa.
Jacob’s books are a literary feast to savor in many voices and expressions, to see oneself in many glances, to observe many souls waiting for the salvation or resurrection of the forgotten, and at the same time words – Olga Tokarzuck’s words – create new worlds, create people yourself and history opens new worlds. And all this follows in the footsteps of Jacob Frank, a visionary, a rebel, the third and final Messiah.
Jacob’s books are something incredibly original, but at the same time demanding a lot from the reader, who must take up the intellectual challenge to which Tokarczuk invites them on their own level. An unusual, difficult, challenging and exciting story.