In the Bamidbar it is said that God told Moses to describe the route of his nation’s wandering, and it seems to me that God told me to do the same. And although I do not believe that I have succeeded, for I was too quick and impatient, or perhaps I simply was too lazy to comprehend it all, I have nonetheless tried to remind them who they are and whence our path has led. For is it not so that our stories are told to us by others? We can know ourselves to the extent that others tell us who we are and what it is we’re struggling to do. What would I remember of my childhood, were it not for my mother? How would I have known myself had I not seen myself reflected in Jacob’s eyes? And so I sat with them and reminded them of what we lived through together, although prophesying future catastrophes had set a fog upon their minds. “Go on, Nahman. Go back to your work. We’ve had enough of you,” they said, and chased me away. But I was stubborn. I reminded them of the streets of Smyrna and Salonika, the meandering of the Danube and the hard Polish winters when in the frost we made our way to Jacob on jingling sleighs. Jacob’s naked body when we witnessed his union with the Spirit. Hayah’s face. The books of Old Shorr. The stern faces of the judges. “Do you even remember those dark times in Częstochowa?” I asked them.
They listened to me attentively, as a person forgets with time his steps, and it seems to him that he has been walking on his own, as he pleases, instead of being led by God.
Is it possible to attain that knowledge, the holy Daat, that Jacob promised us?
I told them: There are two varieties of it being impossible to know. The first variety is when someone does not even try to ask or investigate, considering that in any case he cannot learn anything in full. And the second is when a person does investigate and seek, and he comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to know completely. Here I referred to an example, that my brothers might better understand the weight of this difference. So I said that it is as if two men wanted to meet a king. One thinks: Since I cannot meet the king, why would I go into his palace at all and wander its chambers? But the second man thinks differently. He looks around the royal chambers, enjoys the royal treasury, delights in the luxurious carpets, and even when he learns he will not be able to meet the king, at least he is familiar with his rooms.
They listened to me without really knowing what point I was trying to make.
So I wanted to remind them of the very beginning and to say one thing—that in reality we had always been occupied with light. We had admired the light in all that exists, we followed its lead down the narrow highways of Podolia, through the Dniester’s fords, crossing the Danube and the best-guarded borders. The light summoned us when we dove after it into the greatest darkness in Częstochowa, and the light guided us from place to place, from home to home.
And I reminded them that in the old language, do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical values? Or is after all written: alef-vav-resh:
which is: 1+6+200=207. While Ein Sof—alef-yod-nun-samekh-vav-pe:
which is: 1+10+50+60+6+80=207.
But the word raz, or mystery, is also 207.
Just look, I told them: all the books we have studied have been about light: the Sefer ha-Bahir is the Book of Brightness, Sha’are Ora are the Gates of Light, Meor Einayim the Light of the Eyes, the Orot ha-Kodesh is the Light of Holiness, and finally, the Sefer haZohar is the Book of Splendor. We have done nothing other than waking up at midnight, at the time of the greatest darkness, in our low, dark cubbyholes, in the cold, to study light.
It is the light that has revealed to us that the huge body of matter and its laws is not mechut, or real, and also all its shapes and manifestations, its infinite forms, its laws and habits. The truth of the world is not matter, but the vibration of the sparks of light, that constant flickering that is located in every last thing.
Remember what we were going after, I said unto them. Religions, laws, books, and old customs have all been worn out. He who reads those old books and observes those laws and customs, it is as if he’s always facing backward, and yet he must move forward. That is why he will stumble and ultimately fall. Since everything that has been has come from the side of death. A wise man, meanwhile, will look ahead, through death, as though this were merely a muslin curtain, and he will stand on the side of life.
And here I sign—I, Nahman Samuel ben Levi of Busk, or Piotr Jakubowski.
VII.
The Book of
NAMES
31.
Jakubowski and the books of death
Jakubowski died not long after the Lord, surviving him by just a year. Yente’s omnipresent gaze sees an official adding his name to the Sterbe und Begraebnis Bücher of the city of Offenbach, under the date of October 19, 1792, giving as a reason for his death: “An einer Geschwulst”—in other words, an ulcer. Since no one truly knows how old Jakubowski was at his death, and since he seems to everyone to have been present since some mythical beginning, one of the young people simply says that he was very old. And so the official writes “aged ninety-five years,” a Methuselan age, worthy of one of the elders. In reality, Jakubowski was born in 1721, meaning he was seventy-one years old, but emaciated by illness, he looked more ancient than he really was. A month after his death, one of his daughters, Rozalia, also dies in Offenbach, bleeding to death in childbed.
Jędrzej Yeruhim Dembowski collected his papers. In the end, there weren’t many—the whole could fit easily enough inside a single little trunk. The Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi, which Jakubowski worked on throughout his life, losing himself in Kabbalistic digressions, turned out to be just a thick stack of papers filled with diagrams, drawings, geometric calculations, and strange maps.
A year after him, Jan Wołowski, called the Cossack, also passed away, and not too much later Joseph Piotrowski, also known as Moshko Kotlarz—Kotlarz meaning “the Tinker” in Polish—who had been sent to Offenbach for a peaceful respite in his old age; though childish and recalcitrant, he was well-cared for there.
In September of 1795, Mateusz Matuszewski died, and less than a month later, so did his wife, Wittel, known as Anna. After her husband’s death, she became oddly insensate to the world, and she never really recovered. It sometimes happens that spouses cannot live without each other and prefer simply to die, one after the next.
The two Szymanowski brothers, Elias and Jacob, also died one after the other, both in old age, after which the rest of the Szymanowski family went back to Warsaw.
With the demise of Jakubowski’s brother Paweł Pawłowski, formerly Hayim of Busk, who was the last of the elders at Offenbach, the court slowly emptied, and although a number of true believers, predominately from Moravia and Germany, still lived in the city, they were less and less connected with the court. When after a long and exhausting illness, Eva Frank’s younger brother Joseph died in 1807, Eva, who had dedicated herself to taking care of him, managed to escape from under her creditors’ watch, fleeing to Venice, but she was brought back by news of Roch’s illness. Roch Frank passed away on November 15, 1813, alone, in his room; they had to break down his door in order to carry out and subsequently bury the unfortunate man’s large, alcohol-swollen body.
Eva Frank saves Offenbach from Napoleonic looting
They had tried to powder up Roch a little when he was already very ill in March of 1813, as Eva Frank was to receive a visit to her home on the corner of Canalstrasse and Judengasse from Tsar Alexander. News of this visit was supposed to be confidential, but it quickly spread around town. The tsar wished to acquaint himself with this famous Jewish-Christian colony, about which he had had ample opportunity to hear during his travels around Europe. As an enlightened and progressive ruler, he had long intended to found, on the territory of his vast nation state, a small country where Jews could live in peace and maintain all of their traditions.
The tsar’s visit fueled rumors that had been circulating around Offenbach for years, that Eva Frank’s intimate ties with the Russian throne were permitting her to
postpone paying off a number of debts. The tsar liked what he saw so much that a few years later he appointed, by imperial decree, a Committee for the Protection of the Israelite Christian colonies that were to be started in Crimea. The primary task of this committee was the conversion of Jews to Christianity.
Eva and Roch had become heroes in Offenbach back in July of 1800, when Roch was still in relatively good health, as wartime upheaval made its way to the town, which until then had been quite peaceful.
The left wing of the French army, which included the Polish Danube Legion fighting under General Kniaziewicz, captured an Austrian cannon, and that very same night, they occupied Offenbach. In a frenzy to loot and plunder, the soldiers descended upon the innocent city, and it was only the decisiveness of Eva and her brother that saved Offenbach. Evincing magnanimity and perfect hospitality, they threw open the doors of their home to their countrymen, receiving them with extravagance, without regard for their own safety, nor for the enormous expense, and in this way, through their generosity and kind words, they were able to quench the lust of the troops. For this Eva would be remembered fondly by the inhabitants of Offenbach. Its women’s virtue, its shop windows, the goods held in its storehouses—all came unscathed through a war that had devastated neighboring towns. And Eva, who was already heavily in debt, managed to obtain further loans.
Sadly, she spent her final years under house arrest with her lady-inwaiting, Paulina Pawłowska, and her secretary, Zaleski, who was responsible for their provisions. After her death, on September 17, 1816, their home was officially sealed off, yet her disappointed creditors found nothing of value inside it, aside from a couple of the baroness’s personal belongings, which were more like souvenirs. The only thing they were able to get any real money for, in fact, was the fantastic dollhouse, with its four stories and many rooms, living rooms, and bathrooms, furnished with crystal chandeliers, silver services, the finest wardrobe. Each of the little house’s appointments was auctioned off separately, amounting to a sizable sum. It all went to a banker in Frankfurt.
Paulina Pawłowska married a local councillor, and for a good while she entertained his social circle with her strange stories of Miss Eva’s various connections, of the court at Vienna, of the wonderful goat with the flexible horns that inspired a certain local artist to place a sculpture depicting it over the entrance to one of the town houses of Offenbach.
Meanwhile, Franciszek Wiktor Zaleski, known as Der Grüne—as he, like his dearly departed wife, always dressed in green—lived happily at Offenbach until the mid-nineteenth century. He had ordered his arteries cut after his death, being terribly afraid of being suspended in a deathlike lethargy.
The skull
All the Offenbach neophytes were buried in the city cemetery, though some years later this cemetery began to interfere with plans to expand the town, and it was ultimately liquidated in 1866. The bones of those buried there were carefully collected and respectfully reburied elsewhere. Jacob Frank’s skull was removed from his grave, and, thoughtfully recorded as “a skull belonging to a Jewish patriarch,” it passed into the hands of the historian of the city of Offenbach. Many years later, under unknown circumstances, it made its way to Berlin, where it underwent detailed measurement and research and was labeled a prime example of Jewish racial inferiority. After the Second World War, it vanished without a trace—either it was destroyed in the turmoil and chaos of war, crumbling to dust, or else it is still lying around somewhere in the underground storage facility of some museum.
Of a meeting in Vienna
One of Katarzyna Kossakowska’s farthest journeys was the one she made in 1777 to Vienna, where she went to receive the title of Countess and the Order of the Starry Cross from Empress Maria Theresa. She was accompanied by her nephew, Ignacy Potocki, whom she loved as a son. Apparently, her straightforwardness was a big hit with the empress, who went so far as to call her “my dear good friend.”
During the ball given in honor of those so decorated, an overjoyed Ignacy presented Katarzyna Kossakowska with a surprise.
“Just guess, my dear good aunt, whom I have brought to see you,” he said excitedly.
A lady in a celadon dress, beautiful and elegant, stood before Kossakowska, face flushed. Smiling widely, she bowed in a gesture of profound respect. Kossakowska was overwhelmed with embarrassment, her eyes smoldering at Ignacy, who had unwittingly put her in an incredibly uncomfortable situation. Then the woman said, politely and in Polish:
“I must remind Your Ladyship of who I am—for I am Eva Frank.”
There was not, however, much time for a conversation. Ignacy only whispered into his aunt’s ear that the gossip here at the court was that Eva Frank had been mistress to the emperor himself, which brought about such overwhelming astonishment in Kossakowska, and brought back such a crush of memories, that she began to cry in their carriage as they were returning from the ball.
Ignacy mistook the tears for the natural emotions of an older woman who has just received an honor, and was not alarmed by them. He merely mentioned in passing that the local Freemasons, with whom young Potocki maintained close ties, had a great deal of good to say of Eva Frank’s father.
Katarzyna died on her estate in Krystynopol at a very advanced age, tenderly nursed through her infirmities by an almost equally decrepit Agnieszka.
Samuel Ascherbach and his sisters
Samuel Ascherbach, son of Rudolf and Gertruda, fell into bad company at university, but he completed his degree successfully, albeit with some difficulties along the way. After a brief, failed practice at one of Vienna’s law firms, where he was perpetually in conflict with his superior, he gave it all up, and, going into some debt, he set off for Hamburg without his parents’ knowledge. There, he first found work with a shipowner as a clerk, then began to practice law again, earning a reputation for consistently managing to win his clients enormous insurance payouts. For reasons not entirely clear (but that apparently had to do with some swindling), after a year of a career that he had been developing successfully, he disappeared. His parents finally received a letter from him from America and spent a long time staring at the envelope, with its stamps that had crossed the ocean. The letter was from Pennsylvania, and it was signed by one Samuel Uscher. They learned from the letter that he had married the daughter of a governor, and that he had become a respected lawyer. Evidently his wife was a good influence on him. From newspapers overseas, which unfortunately had no chance of making it into the Viennese coffeehouse Gertruda and Rudolf Ascherbach liked to frequent, it could eventually be gleaned that his American career culminated in his appointment as a Supreme Court judge. He sired seven children. He died in 1842.
His twin sisters settled in Weimar and Breslau, where they married respectable Jewish burghers. Christina’s husband, Dr. Löwe, was an active member of Breslau’s First Society of Brothers, an organization of progressive Jews. Husband and wife both played a part in the establishment and construction of the famous White Stork Synagogue. Katarina, unfortunately, died in her first childbirth, and no trace of her was left.
The Załuski Brothers’ Library and Canon Benedykt Chmielowski
The collections amassed so industriously and at such extravagant expense by the two brother bishops, the state of which had so worried Father Chmielowski, eventually attained an unprecedented size—around four hundred thousand volumes and twenty thousand manuscripts, not even counting the thousands of etchings and engravings. In 1774, the library was taken over by the Commission of National Education, and in 1795, after the final partition of Poland, the library was sent in its entirety to Petersburg, by order of Catherine the Great. Having taken several months to make its way, in carts and wagons, it remained there until the First World War. In 1921, the collections were partially returned to Poland, but they burned during the Warsaw Uprising.
It is a good thing Father Chmielowski did not live to see that sight—the flames devouring the letters, little flakes of paper flying high into the sky.
If human beings had only known how to truly preserve their knowledge of the world, if they had just engraved it into rock, into crystals, into diamond, and in so doing, passed it on to their descendants, then perhaps the world would now look altogether otherwise. For what are we to do with such a brittle stuff as paper? What can come of writing books?
In the case of Father Chmielowski, wood, brick, stone—every seemingly stronger material—failed him just as paper would have done. Nothing was left of his presbytery, not even the garden, nor the lapidary. Turf grew over the broken inscription, where rhizomes multiplied, and now those carved letters of his hold their court underground. Blind moles pass by them every day, and earthworms on their winding travels, indifferent to the fact that the letter N in No is written backward.
The martyrdom of Junius Frey
After the Lord’s death, Thomas von Schönfeld was summoned by Eva to Offenbach as the Lord’s “nephew.” Oddly, now the younger people, especially the true believers from Moravia and Germany, welcomed him as the Lord’s rightful successor. Some of the Poles joined them, including the Łabęckis and Jan Wołowski’s children. Yet apparently one evening it all culminated in a great quarrel, and Thomas packed up and left the next day.
The Books of Jacob Page 101
