At the end of a positive but somewhat perfunctory review of The Books of Jacob in the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes
The Books of Jacob rarely touches the emotions. No page, for me, turned itself. A word from Finnegans Wake came to mind: thunderslog. I don’t mean to dissuade. As with certain operas, I’m glad to have had the experience — and equally glad that it’s over.
I can sympathize with Garner, a man who makes his living reviewing books. The Books of Jacob, which is a novel by the way, follows a large group of people over a large swath of Europe for several decades in the 18th century, running to just short of 1000 pages. It’s not cryptic or elliptical or gnomic, much, but it makes substantial demands on a reader’s time and energy. I experienced none of Garner’s impatience for two reasons: One, I was already something of a Tokarczuk fan after reading two of her earlier novels, including Flights. Two, I had no deadline, and tend to enjoy novels that capture the experiences of a large cast of characters living through tumultuous times while hewing closely to the historical realities of those times. I have no problem with devoting a month of my reading time to such books. For me, the two books that I’ve read in the past decade that best match this description, and that gave me a great deal of pleasure, were Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (which I rate higher than her justly celebrated Wolf Hall trilogy), about some prominent people during the French Revolution, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, about people from different ranks of Soviet society during the siege of Stalingrad during World War II. (The links are to my blog posts on these books).
The story that Tokarczuk tells is really many stories, but the main one is of a group of acolytes who cohere around a Jewish trader from Wallachia, now part of Romania, in the decades after 1750. The map of Europe looked very different in those days, with Poland stretching from the Baltic all the way to the Black Sea, where it shared a border with the Ottoman Empire, which then encompassed most of the countries that we now call the Balkans (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, etc.). The story opens in Podolia, which was then part of Poland but is today in Western Ukraine.
The trader’s name is originally Jakub Lejbowicz, but he takes the name Jacob Frank as his fame and influence grow. He is proclaimed to be a messiah, but we come to understand that this word doesn’t have quite the apocalyptic significance for the people in this book that it has today. For one thing, there could be more than one messiah, and in fact, Jacob is the third in a series, the first being a man named Sabbatai Tzvi who had lived a hundred years earlier. The majority of Jews in Eastern Europe (the so-called Pale of Settlement) looked upon Tzvi’s followers skeptically, as a kind of cult.
When we first glimpse Jacob Frank he is living in Turkey, about to be married. Most of his friends and colleagues are followers of Sabbatai Tzvi.
They don’t even hide it, and openly proclaim their Messiah without fear of prosecution here in Turkey, since the sultan tolerates different religions as long as they do not get too intrusive. These Jews are already somewhat acclimated to their new home; they have even grown slightly Turkish in their aspects, and their demeanor is free.
The Books of Jacob is a mostly realistic novel, so there is nothing mystical about how Jacob becomes their new messiah, which isn’t to say that the process isn’t mysterious. His initial stakes are charisma, intelligence, and good looks. The time and place are fortuitous: his associates are of a passionate and rebellious nature, steeped in the Kabbalah. They conceive of themselves as “Anti-Talmudists,” meaning that they reject the body of laws, observances and prescriptions that define mainstream Judiasm.
I should stop at this point and say that The Books of Jacob is not a book specifically about Jews or Judiasm. Tokarczuk, as her name indicates, is not Jewish herself, and her book is really about the interplay of people and events in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, and about how religion can become politics, and politics can become religion. The scale, as in the best historical fiction, is both microscopic, dealing with the fates of dozens of individual characters, and macroscopic, dealing with events that affect nations. There are various non-Jewish characters, most of whom stand at the periphery of the action and contribute a perspective on the larger events. Father Benedykt Chmielowski, for one, is featured in the novel’s opening scene and then reappears every so often. Tokarczuk gives us flirty but discrete excerpts from the letters he exchanges with a poet named Elżbieta Drużbacka. They discuss their own concerns, only occasionally commenting on larger events. I was mildly surprised to find that Tokarczuk did not invent either of these seemingly minor characters. Perhaps an educated Polish reader would be expected to know them.
Jacob and his followers start out in Smyrna (a town in Turkey today known as Izmir) and end up in Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt, 40 years later. The action tends in a northwesterly arc, and as they move toward the intellectual heart of Enlightenment Europe, Jacob and his crew evolve from a voluptuous free-loving gang into a rigid, insular community with power and money conflicts. This progression might remind us of any number of “cults” in modern times but the difference is that Jacob and his advisors are able to shrewdly negotiate with and play off the secular and religious powers of their day. They are renegades, outsiders, but they figure out how to form strategic alliances and remain viable, and even to thrive, for a very long time.
Jacob, like Sabbatai Tzvi before him, is persuaded to convert to Islam early on, while living in Turkey. This might seem to mar his credentials as a messiah, but Jacob shrugs it off as a necessary expedient—it earns his group the protection of the sultan. Later on, after returning to Poland, he takes this stratagem to a new level by offering to convert to Christianity in exchange for a protected status for his ever-growing sect. The middle third of the book details the alliances and maneuvers that follow upon this offer. To the Catholic clergy in Poland, the offer has considerable appeal. For one thing, it would earn them credit for bringing perhaps tens of thousands of souls into the bosom of Mother Church. For another, it would exasperate and weaken the influence of the unconverted “Talmudic” Jewish majority. After a celebrated disputation against the traditionalist Jews in the cathedral in Lwów (Lviv in modern Ukraine), the conversion proceeds with mass baptisms.
According to Tokarczuk, Jacob Frank is no more a Christian at heart than he was a Muslim or, for that matter, a Jew. He claims that his mystical tradition speaks of a trinity and offers this to the clerics to demonstrate the sincerity of his conversion. In reality, Frank’s religion doesn’t seem to care much about metaphysics. But conversion is a double-edged sword for the Frankists, because while it buys them the support of certain highly-placed clerics (one of whom inconveniently dies at a crucial moment), it cuts them off from the protection that a deeply rooted established religion might afford. The moment of conversion is the high-water mark for Jacob Frank’s cult.
Frank plays the role of messiah quite well. He’s good at his job. The only other messiah that I know anything about was Jesus, and it’s impossible to guess what his process might have been. How should a messiah behave? Jacob Frank speaks to his assembled followers every night and assembles a committee of highly educated former rabbis to work for his cause. He also has in his fold a man who goes by the name Moliwda who is actually a Polish count named Kossakowski. Moliwda has been living in Greece and is fluent in several languages. He serves as a sort of minister or ambassador for the Frank party.
Tokarczuk fills in the details of her story with various letters and journal entries written by Frank’s would-be apostles. I don’t know how many of these interpolated documents are historical, but I’m beginning to understand, after a few internet search sessions, that most probably are.
What are we to make of Jacob Frank? Is he a good person, an important person, a profound person? Or is he just the unwitting nucleus of a kind of phenomenon that tends to occur in some form or other from time to time in human history? We enjoy his early successes and the camaraderie of his group, much as we might wish we had been at Woodstock in 1969 or in Haight Ashbury in 1967 (such, at least, are the demi-Edens that I grew up with). Then we look on sadly as he eventually grows old, feeble, and fractious. His children disappoint him and his disciples betray him.
Tokarczuk does not judge, and she does not allow us to do so either.
What makes The Books of Jacob so fascinating, and so challenging, is that it is a dispatch from a world that most English-speaking readers never knew existed. We know so little of the world, and we make such a fuss about the few people and events we do know a little bit about: Julius Ceasar, Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln. It can be salutary to change the channel and tune in a time and a place that are otherwise blank in our experience, even if the copious details happen to make a book reviewer weary.
