The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Nahman looks north and sees far, far away, in the folds of the swirling obscurity, a little village that extends over the swamps, under the low sky that reaches all the way down to the church tower. It seems completely devoid of color, as if made out of peat coated in a fine layer of ash.

  When I was born, in 5481—1721 according to the Christian system—my father, a new rabbi, was just taking up his position, not yet realizing the nature of where he had chosen to settle down.

  In Busk, the river Bug connects with the Pełtew. The city has always belonged to the king, not to the gentry, which is why life was easy enough for us there, though no doubt also why it was always being destroyed, now by the Cossacks, now by the Turks. If the sky is a mirror that reflects time, then an image of burning homes is ever o’erhanging Busk. The town would be totally destroyed and then rebuilt chaotically, in all directions, upon that swampy ground, water reigning supreme in Busk, so that whenever the spring thaws came, mud would creep onto the roads and cut off the town from the rest of the world, and the town’s inhabitants, like all inhabitants of swamps and peat bogs, would simply sit in their damp shacks, gloomy, stagnant, almost as if they’d been covered in mold.

  The Jews lived in little groups around a number of different neighborhoods, but the highest concentration of them was in the Old Town and in Lipiboki. They were often in the horse trade, taking the animals from town to town, to different fairs and marketplaces, and some had small tobacco shops, although most of these were truly the size of a doghouse. Some of them farmed, and there were a few craftsmen. For the most part people lived in squalor, miserable and superstitious, wishful for some salvation to come.

  We watched the Ruthenian and Polish peasants around us, and we saw that they were always bent over the land, straightening up only come evening, when they would sit out on the little benches in front of their houses with a certain superiority about them. But it was better to be a Jew than a peasant. They would take stock of us as well, wondering where those Jewish women might be going on those Jewish carts, and why were they so noisy! Their women squinted, having been blinded by the sun all day as they gathered the ears of corn left behind by the harvest.

  In the spring, when the riverside pastures turned green, hundreds or maybe even thousands of storks flew into Busk, strutting about regally, extending their necks with great dignity, so proud. This must have been the reason such a quantity of children followed: the peasants believed the storks brought them.

  There is a stork on Busk’s coat of arms, standing on one leg. So did we, the people of Busk, always stand on one leg, ready to set forth into the world, yet tethered to a lifelong lease, a single tenancy. All around us it was swampy and wet. We had the right to leave, officially, yet that right was unstable, murky as the dirty water.

  Busk, like many little Podolian towns and much of the countryside, was inhabited almost entirely by us, by people who called each other “one of ours” and themselves “the true believers.” We believed with a pure heart and very deeply that the Messiah had already come to Turkey and that when he’d gone, he’d left us a successor, and above all a path down which we were enjoined to go.

  The more my father would read and discuss at the beth midrash, the more he, too, would incline toward such views. Within a year of coming to this place, having read all the texts pertaining to the teachings of Sabbatai Tzvi, he became fully convinced by them, his innate sensitivity and feeling for religion conducive to such a shift.

  “Because how can it be?” he would say. “Why, if God so cherishes us, is there so much suffering in the world? You have only to go so far as the market square in Busk, and your legs will buckle under the weight of all that pain. If He cherishes us so, then why are we not healthy, why are we not preserved from hunger, and not only us—why not others, as well, so that we don’t have to gaze upon illness and death?” He would hunch over as if wanting to demonstrate the weight of this hardship. And then he would fall back into his usual diatribe against rabbis and their rules, and he would start to lose his temper and gesticulate.

  As a child, I would often see him on the little market square, in front of Shila’s shop, standing around with others, boisterously gabbing. His small, plain figure appeared larger as he talked, for he spoke with fervor and conviction.

  “From a single rule in the Torah, the Mishnah came up with dozens, and the Gemara many dozens more; meanwhile, in the later commentaries, there are as many rules as there are grains of sand. So tell me: How is it we’re supposed to live?” he would say, so dramatically that passersby would pause.

  Shila, who wasn’t too concerned about business, being more interested in the company of gregarious men, would nod his head sadly, offering them his pipe: “Pretty soon nothing will be kosher any longer.”

  “It’s hard to follow the requirements when you’re starving,” the others agreed, and sighed. Sighing, too, was a part of conversing. Most of them were simple merchants, but sometimes teachers from the yeshiva would come and add their insights to 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. Something must have been left out from what we learned in our yeshivas. Certain facts have been concealed from us, no doubt, and this is why we cannot assemble the world as we know it into a single whole. There has to be a secret somewhere to explain it all.

  Since the time of my father’s youth, everyone in Busk spoke in this way, and the name Sabbatai Tzvi came up often—and not in a whisper, either. It sounded to my child’s ears like the gallop of horses bearing riders who were racing to our defense. These days, it would be wiser not to pronounce that name too loud.

  My youth

  From the beginning, I wished to study the Scriptures, like many boys my age, but as an only child, I was also much attached to my mother and father. It was only when I turned sixteen that I realized I wanted to be in the service of some good cause and that I was also the kind of person who would never be satisfied with what was, always wanting what was not yet.

  Which is why when I first started to hear talk of the great master the Baal Shem Tov, and of the fact that he was accepting students, I decided to join one of those little cohorts, and it was in this way that I left behind my native Busk. To the despair of my mother, I set out on my own for the east, to Międzybóz., a journey of some two hundred miles. On the first day I encountered a boy just a little bit older than myself who was setting out with the same purpose from Glinno and had already been on the road for three days. Leybko, as he was called, had just been married, though he could scarcely even grow a mustache, and he was so terrified of his own marriage that he convinced his wife and parents-in-law that before he began to earn a living, he needed first to commune with true holiness and have his fill of it, so that it might keep him through the years to come. Leybko came from a respected family of Glinno rabbis, and the fact that he wound up falling in with the Hassidim was a great misfortune as far as his family was concerned. Twice his father had come after him and begged him to return home.

  Soon he and I were inseparable. We slept under a single tattered blanket and shared every bite of bread. I liked talking with him, he was a very sensitive person and thought differently from everyone else. We continued our conversations into the night under that ragged blanket, dissecting all the greatest mysteries.

  And it was he, as a man already married, who introduced me to that other mystery that exists, between a woman and a man, which seemed to me then just as fascinating as all the questions of the tzimtzum.

  The house was big and made of wood, with low ceilings. We slept side by side in a bed that was as wide as the whole room, cuddled together, skinny boys under filthy blankets amongst
which we often found lice; we would cover our calves in mint leaves after we had been bitten. We ate little—bread, olives, a bit of turnip. Sometimes women brought in special treats for us, like raisins, but there were so many of us boys that we would get only a couple each, just enough that we did not forget the taste. On the other hand, we read voraciously, without pause, which left our eyes always bloodshot—this was how people came to recognize us. We looked like white rabbits. And in the evenings, when the Besht was able to dedicate some of his sacred time to us, we would hear him and his conversations with the other tzaddikim. Then I began to be interested in problems that my father had not been able to resolve for me in a convincing way. Like how could the world exist, since God is everywhere? Since God is everything in everything, then how could there be things other than God? And how could God have created the world out of nothing?

  We know that every generation has thirty-six holy persons, and that it is thanks to them that God is able to maintain the existence of the world. Without a doubt, the Baal Shem Tov was one of them. Although the majority of holy men remain unrecognized, just living their ordinary lives as poor tavern keepers or cobblers, the Besht’s virtues were so great it would have been impossible to keep them secret. He did not suffer from pride, and yet whenever he appeared, everyone somehow felt intimidated, which wearied him greatly. He carried his holiness like so much heavy luggage. He did not in any way resemble my father, who was always sad and angry. The Besht shone one color after the other. One minute he looked like an old sage, and he spoke in a serious tone with his eyes half closed; the next something came over him, and he would throw caution to the wind, let himself be at ease with us, joking and eliciting roars of laughter. He was always ready to do something unexpected, something shocking. In this way, he attracted attention to himself, and there he invariably kept it. To all of us, he was the center of the world.

  No one here was drawn to lifeless, empty rabbinism. In that respect we were all alike, and my father would have approved of it. There were daily readings of the Zohar, eagerly anticipated, and many of the older men were Kabbalists with clouded eyes, who were incessantly discussing with one another the divine mysteries in the same way they might have talked about household practicalities such as how much they fed the chickens or how much hay they had left for the winter . . .

  Once a Kabbalist asked the Besht if he believed the world to be an emanation of God. “Oh, yes,” he said, “the whole world is God.” Everyone wholeheartedly seconded this enthusiastic response. “And evil?” asked the Kabbalist, tricky and malicious. “Evil, too, is God,” calmly retorted the Besht, and he was placid, but now a murmur passed through all those present, and soon the voices of other learned tzaddikim and various holy and distinguished men piped up. All conversations in this place provoked violent reactions—the overturning of chairs, sobs, cries, men pulling out their hair. Many times did I watch them debate this very question. And my blood boiled then, too, for indeed, how could it be? All this that surrounded us—how to account for it? Under what rubric were we to place hunger and bodily injury, and the slaughter of animals, and children felled by the plague and laid row upon row in the earth? In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.

  It sufficed for someone to point out that evil was not evil in itself, but rather only in the eyes of man, and a skirmish would break out at table; water would spill out from a broken jug and soak into the sawdust on the floor; one man would run out of the room in anger; another would have to be prevented from dealing a blow. Such was the power of the spoken word.

  This was why the Besht always said to us: “The secret of evil is the only one God doesn’t ask us to take on faith, but rather has us consider.” And so I considered this all day and all night, for sometimes my lanky body that ceaselessly demanded food did not let me sleep, out of hunger. I considered that perhaps it was true that God recognized the mistake he had made, expecting the impossible from humankind. For he had wanted a person without sin. Therefore God had to make a choice. He could punish for sins, punish incessantly and become a kind of eternal oeconomist of our world, the manager who whips the peasants when they do not work as they are supposed to in their master’s fields. Yet God might also, in his infinite wisdom, have been ready to bear human sinfulness, to leave a space for the weakness of man. God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is simultaneously free and fully subject to me. I cannot have a creature free from sin who would be at the same time a person. Better sinful humanity than a world without men.

  Oh, we all agreed with that! We skinny boys in our ripped kapotas with sleeves that had always been too short, sitting on one side of the table, with the teachers on the other.

  I spent several months with the Besht’s holy men, and though it was hard and cold, I did feel that it was only now that my soul was catching up with my body, which had not only been growing but was becoming more manly. My legs were covered with black hair just as both my chest and my stomach got harder. And now my soul, too, chased after my body, becoming stronger. In addition to this, I had the impression that I was developing a new sense, the existence of which had stayed a secret to me until now.

  Some people have a sense of unearthly things, just as others have an excellent sense of smell or hearing or taste. They can feel the subtle shifts in the great and complicated body of the world. And some of these have so honed that inner sight that they can even tell where a holy spark has fallen, notice its glow in the very place you would least expect it. The worse the place, the more fervently the spark gleams, flickers—and the warmer and purer is its light.

  But there are also those who do not have this sense, who must simply trust the remaining five and entrust the world to them. And just as a man born blind knows not what light might be, or a deaf man music, or a man without a sense of smell the plenitude of flowers, so, too, can those without the sixth sense be merely bewildered by mystical souls, take them for madmen, for fanatics, for people who make up such things for reasons unknown.

  That year, we disciples of the Besht (of blessed memory) began to be tormented by a strange ailment, as he himself called it with sadness and disquiet, though I did not know what he was thinking of.

  Once during prayer one of the older boys burst into tears and could not be calmed. He was taken to see the holy one, and there the miserable wretch, sobbing, admitted that as he was praying the Shema he had pictured Jesus Christ and had thus directed the words of his prayer to him. As soon as that young man uttered those terrible words, everyone covered their ears with their hands and closed their eyes, so as not to give their senses access to such sacrilege. But the Besht merely shook his head sadly, and then he gave a simple explanation that brought us great relief: the boy had to pass near some sort of Christian shrine every day, and there he would see Christ. And when one looks at something a long time, or sees it often, that image gets inside the eyes and the mind, eating into them like lye. A person’s mind needs sanctity, so it seeks it everywhere, like a plant shoot growing in a cave that rises toward any, even the slightest, light. That was a good explanation.

  Leybko and I had a hidden passion: we would endeavor to listen to the words that surfaced in the murmur of prayers spoken on the other side of a partition, attuned to how the phrases ran together as the recitations picked up speed, mixing their meanings. The stranger the results of these games, the greater our enjoyment.

  In Międzybóż all were as attentive to words as we were; thus the town itself seemed wayward, will I, nill I, insubstantial, as if in that contact with the word, matter hid its tail between its legs and cowered, ashamed. The muddy, cart-trod road appeared to go nowhere, while the little cottages set along it and the house of learning—the only one with a wide wooden porch of rotted, blackened wood, into which we bored holes with our fingers—seemed to belong to a dream.

  I could also say that we bored holes into words, glimpsing thus their cavernous inter
iors. My first revelation concerned the similarity between two words.

  Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.

  Of the caravan, and how I met Reb Mordke

  When I returned home, in order to retain me, my family married me to sixteen-year-old Leah, an intelligent, trusting, sympathetic girl who would give me support until the day she died. Yet the marriage did not serve its purpose, for, having found a pretext in the form of a job working for Elisha Shorr, I set off on a business trip to Prague and Brünn.

  It was on this journey that I met Mordechai ben Elias Margalit, known to everyone as Reb Mordke, may the memory of this righteous one be a blessing. He was another Besht to me, but he was also the only one, for I had him all to myself, while he, evidently feeling the same thing that I did, took me on as his student. I do not know what so attracted me to him—those who say that certain souls recognize each other instantly and cling to one another inexplicably are right. The truth is that I disconnected from the Shorrs and decided to remain with him, forgetting the family I had left in Podolia.

  He was a disciple of the famous rabbi Jonatan Eibeschütz, who was in turn heir to the oldest teachings.

  At first, Reb Mordke’s theories seemed muddled to me. I had the impression that he was in a state of perpetual elation, which caused him to breathe shallowly, as if he feared taking in too much earthly air; only once filtered through a pipe did it allow him to live.