And so, if Yente had ever professed any religion, after all the constructions her ancestors and her contemporaries had built up in her mind, her religion now is her faith in the Dead and their unfulfilled, imperfect, miscarried, or aborted efforts at repairing the world.
At the end of this story, when her body has become pure crystal, Yente discovers a completely new ability. She ceases to be just a witness, an eye that travels through space and time—she can also flow through human bodies, women, men, and children, and time speeds up so everything happens very fast, in one instant.
It becomes clear that these bodies are like leaves in which, for a single season, for a few months, the light resides. Then they fall down dead and dry, and the darkness grinds them into dust. Yente would like to be able to see this shift fully, as they pass from one stage into the next, urged on by their souls that strive impatiently for renewed incarnation, but even for her, this much is inconceivable.
Freyna, Pesel’s sister, later Anusia Pawłowska, lived to enjoy a ripe old age in Korolówka, where she was born, and she was buried in that beautiful Jewish cemetery that slopes downhill, to the river. She never had any contact with her sister, and, busy raising twelve children, she forgot about her. Besides, her husband, as a good Jew, kept the fact of his wife’s heretic relatives a great secret.
Her great-grandchildren were also living in Korolówka at the outbreak of the Second World War. The memory of the cave in the shape of the alef and of their Old Grandmother had been preserved, especially among the women, those older ones who remembered things that would seem frivolous and fantastic as they offered no instruction on baking bread or building houses.
Freyna’s great-great-granddaughter, who was called Czarna, or Black, the eldest in her family, absolutely insisted that they not go to Barszczów to register as the Germans had ordered them to. Never trust any authority, she would say. Which is why when all the Jews of Korolówka were setting off for the city with their belongings bundled, they quietly, in the night, pulling little carts carrying their things, went into the forest.
On October 12, 1942, five families from Korolówka, thirty-eight people, the youngest of whom was a child just five months old, and the eldest of whom was seventy-nine, left their village homes and entered the cave just before dawn from the forest entrance, where the powerful underground letter alef has its uppermost, rightmost stroke.
Some of the rooms in the cave are filled with crystals that come out of the walls and down from the ceilings. People say that these are frozen drops of light that got stuck down in the ground and stopped shining. But as soon as they are touched with a candle flame, they will light up again, showing their eternal, silent interior.
In one of these rooms lies Yente. The damp, alighting on her skin for so many years, is now fully adhered to her bones, crystallizing, sparkling, shining bright. Its glow grows deep into her body and renders her almost translucent. Yente transforms slowly into crystal and, in a few million more years, she will be a diamond. Meanwhile, her eyes are still moving, and a smile slowly spreads across her face, not directed at anybody now. That long pinkish crystal, grown into the rock, which lights up from time to time from the sparingly used oil lamps, shows a blurred and indistinct interior. The children, who have become used to life in the cave and are already able to venture deep inside it, say that that piece of the rock is alive. If you tried to shine a light on it, all the way inside, you would see a tiny human face in there, but of course no one takes this seriously, especially since nearly a year and a half spent in the dark has permanently debilitated their eyesight.
The adults go out from time to time for provisions, but they never venture as far as any of the nearby villages. The villagers treat them like ghosts, leaving for them, as if by accident, through some oversight, bags of flour or potatoes out behind their barns.
In April 1944, someone throws a bottle into the hole leading into the cave; inside the bottle is a piece of paper that says, in a clumsy hand, “Germans gone.”
They come out blinded, shielding their eyes from the light.
They have all survived, and in the postwar chaos, most of them manage to emigrate to Canada, where they tell their story, so improbable that few believe them.
Yente sees the forest’s undergrowth, small clumps of blackberries, the bright leaves of young oaks at the entrance to the cave, and then the whole hill and the village, and the roads down which dart vehicles. She sees the flash of the Dniester, like the flash of the blade of a knife, and the other rivers that carry water out to seas, and the seas, laden with great ships transporting goods. And she sees the lighthouses communicating by means of little scraps of light. For a moment, she pauses on her journey upward, thinking she can hear somebody calling her. Who might still know Yente’s name? Down below, she makes out a sitting figure, her face lit up by some white glow, hair peculiar, attire eccentric—yet nothing has surprised Yente in an awfully long time; she has lost that ability. She just watches letters appear out of nowhere from under this figure’s fingers on a bright flat rectangle of light, lining up obediently in little rows. The only thing Yente can think of that is like this is tracks in the snow—since the dead lose their ability to read, one of death’s most unfortunate consequences . . . And so poor Yente is unable to recognize her own name in this YENTE YENTE YENTE displayed now on the screen. She therefore loses interest and vanishes somewhere up above.
Here, however, where we are, there is a buzzing sound, the grim sound of matter, and the world falls into obscurity, and the earth goes out. There can be no doubt that the world is made of darkness. Now we find ourselves on the side of darkness.
Nonetheless it is written that any person who toils over matters of Messiahs, even failed ones, even just to tell their stories, will be treated just the same as he who studies the eternal mysteries of light.
A Note on Sources
It’s a good thing the novel has traditionally been understood as a fiction, since that means its author is generally not expected to furnish a complete bibliography. In this case in particular, that would take up entirely too much space.
Anyone interested in the story told in this book should first of all obtain Aleksander Kraushar’s Frank i frankiści polscy 1726–1816: Monogra‑ fia historyczna, published in 1895, as well as that record of the “chats” given by Frank himself, Księga Słów Pańskich: Ezoteryczne wykłady Jakuba Franka, edited by Jan Doktór (1997). There is an English translation of the latter, done by Harris Lenowitz, called The Collection of the Words of the Lord, by Jacob Frank. The amplest historical and political context that might permit a greater understanding of the phenomenon of Frankism in Poland is given by Paweł Maciejko’s The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011, as I was writing my novel. An article on the doctrine of Sabbatai Tzvi by the same author showed me what, at its very essence, Frankism might be. The three paradoxes seen through the lens of Sabbatian theology, taken up by Nahman (“Of what draws persons together, and certain clarifications regarding the transmigration of souls”), were borrowed (with the author’s permission) from Maciejko’s earlier work, “Coitus interruptus in And I Came this Day unto the Fountain,” in R. Jonathan Eibeschütz’s And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, a volume also edited and introduced by Pawel Maciejko, published in Los Angeles in 2014.
The foundational reading that then organized all other study of subjects connected to Judaism was of course Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
I found a detailed account of the blood libel in Markowa Wolica in 1752, along with a number of relevant documents, in Kazimierz Rudnicki’s Biskup Kajetan Sołtyk 1715–1788, published in Kraków in 1906 as volume 5 of Monografia w zakresie dziejów nowożytnych, edited by Szymon Askenazy. I based the testimonies during the Lwów dispute on Gaudenty Pikulski’s Sąd żydowski we lwowskim kościele Archikatedralnym 1759 r. (fourth edition, published in 1906).
My psychological
portrait of Katarzyna Kossakowska was inspired by her brief appearance in Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s Macocha, as well as by the extensive correspondence conducted by the real Kossakowska herself. Moliwda’s character owes much to Andrzej Żuławski and his book Moliwda (1994). And I drew much of my information on Thomas von Schönfeld from Krzysztof Rutkowski’s book Kościół Świętego Rocha: Przepowieści (2001).
It brought me great joy to work on the character of Father Benedykt Chmielowski, vicar forane of Rohatyn, later canon of Kiev, first Polish encyclopedist. To anyone interested I do highly recommend reading Nowe Ateny albo Akademia Wszelkiej sciencyi pełna, wonderfully selected and edited by Maria and Jan Józef Lipscy in 1966. Truth be told, this fantastic work is overdue for a new edition. Father Chmielowski’s encounter with the terrific—though no longer well-known to a general public—Baroque poet Elżbieta Drużbacka is not recorded anywhere, but according to all the laws of probability it could certainly have happened, for after all they moved in similar orbits, in terms of both time and place.
The death, wedding, and birth certificates I found in the municipal archive of Offenbach am Main enabled me to reconstruct the composition of the company that remained with Jacob Frank in exile until the very end, and also to more or less trace the fates of the Frankist families that returned to Poland.
That would be a worthy subject for another book.
The illustrations in this book come, in large part, from the collections of the Ossolineum Library in Warsaw.
The alternative numbering of the pages in this book is a nod to books written in Hebrew, as well as a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve gotten used to.
I feel certain that Father Chmielowski would derive great satisfaction from knowing that his idea of information available to all and at any moment would be realized some two hundred fifty years after his death. It is in fact thanks to the pansophy of the internet that I happened upon the trail of the “miracle” in the Korolówka Cave—the astonishing story of dozens of people’s survival of the Holocaust. This trail also led me to conclude, firstly, that so many things remain quietly connected, and secondly, that history is the unceasing attempt to understand what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.
Author’s Acknowledgments
This book could never have appeared in this form had it not been for the assistance of many. I wish to thank all those I have been tormenting for years now with stories of the Frankists and who, in pressing me for further explanation, rightly put forward questions that in turn helped me understand the complex and multilayered sense and significance of this story.
I thank my publisher for being patient; Waldemar Popek for his careful, thoughtful reading; Wojciech Adamski for locating a number of anachronisms and checking a whole host of small details, without which a novel always feels a little undercooked. Thank you to Henryka Salawa for the Benedictine editorial work, and to Alek Radomski for providing the original Polish edition of The Books of Jacob with its unusual graphic design.
I am especially grateful to Paweł Maciejko for his valuable comments concerning Jewish history and in particular the doctrine of Jacob Frank.
Heartfelt thanks to Karol Maliszewski for being able to carry Nahman’s Prayer through time and space with poetry. To Kinga Dunin, for being my first reader, as usual.
I wish to thank Andrzej Link-Lenczowski for the in-depth historical consultation.
The illustrations in this book are thanks to access to the collections at Wrocław’s Ossolineum granted me by the library’s director, Adolf Juzwenko, while Dorota Sidorowicz-Mulak was the one who helped me get my bearings in that vast trove of materials. I am deeply grateful to them both.
After reading my first draft, my mom, who is a very inquisitive person, turned my attention to several little but essential facts relating to social customs, for which I am very grateful to her.
Above all, meanwhile, I thank Grzegorz for his talents as a detective on the trail; his ability to poke around in the least obvious sources yielded an incredible wealth of threads and ideas. And his patient and fortifying presence always gave me strength and permitted me to hope that I might one day see this book to its conclusion.
Translator’s Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to translate this book without the support of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, MacDowell, the Instytut Książki, and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. Nahman’s first prayer and Blumele’s version set to music were written in English by my husband, Boris Dralyuk, who has always been the greatest champion of my work and my most brilliant interlocutor. I am infinitely grateful to Jeremy Schonfield for his excellent suggestions and to my wonderful agent, Katie Grimm, for her help and encouragement, and I am likewise thankful to the community of Olga’s translators into many world languages for regularly exchanging questions and ideas, and in particular to German translators Lisa Palmes and Lothar Quinkenstein, who generously shared their work with me. The Books of Jacob is in polyglot conversation with myriad other texts; following its author’s lead, I have taken the story of the visitor to the tavern in Busk (in “The Book of Sand,” near the start of Nahman’s “Scraps”) from The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, using Paul Reitter’s beautiful translation.
Olga Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. She has received many other honours, including her country Poland’s highest literary award, the Nike, for both Flights and The Books of Jacob, considered by many to be Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. Her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was also highly praised. She is the author of nine novels, three story collections, a children’s book and two collections of essays, and has been translated into fifty languages. Widely regarded as the most important Polish writer of her generation, she lives in Poland.
Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. She won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF JACOB
‘Prodigious…Combining immense erudition to writing that is as fluid as it is poetic, [Tokarczuk] brings to life over the course of a thousand pages the epic story of a messianic group in a multicultural Poland.’ Le Monde
‘A literary-philosophical masterpiece.’ Die Zeit
‘Can you write a 900-page novel that keeps you in suspense? Olga Tokarczuk succeeded.’ Polityka
PRAISE FOR FLIGHTS
‘[A] passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness, for the acceptance of “fluidity, mobility, illusoriness”.’ Guardian
‘A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, a soaring journey across space and through time.’ Nicolas Rothwell
‘Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body.’ Spectator
‘Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don’t last. Wrong—they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.’ Toby Litt
‘This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’ Saturday Paper
‘Flights is a fragmented, bursting-with-life novel…A lively and strange collection of portraits of unrelated characters, all in transit, woven together by the narrator’s essayistic musings.’ Australian
‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers… Flights is a narrative to accompany one’s life—each new reading reveals a further destination, another idea to excite and engage the imagination.’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Disarming and wonderfully encouraging…Croft’s translation from Polish is light as a feather ye
t captures well the economy and depth of Tokarczuk’s deceptively simple style. A welcome reminder of how love drives out fear…’ Millions
PRAISE FOR DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD
‘It’s a crime story. It’s also a study in isolation and mental illness. And a masterclass in literary eccentricity…There’s nothing else quite like it.’ Warren Ellis
‘This dazzling writer…feels the heartbeat of the natural world… One of the exhilarations of this novel is working through a complex truth about living among others.’ Monthly
‘Tokarczuk’s prescient, provocative and furiously comic fiction seethes with a Blakean conviction of the cleansing power of rage: the vengeance of the weak when justice is denied.’ New Statesman
‘An astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’ Guardian
‘Tokarczuk’s style, combining wit, uncanny metaphor, biological truth and metaphysical profundity, is unique. Her books reveal just how good literature can be.’ Saturday Paper
‘Darkly funny, politically charged, fiercely feminist, and occasionally just a little bit weird.’ AU Review
‘Tokarczuk raises essential questions about whose voices are privileged above others.’ TIME
‘[A] barbed and subversive tale about what it takes to challenge the complacency of the powers that be.’ Boston Globe
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a masterful storyteller who challenges expectations of what a story can be.’ Age
‘One of the most existentially refreshing novels I’ve read in a long time.’ New Yorker
The Text Publishing Company acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the country on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pays respect to their Elders past and present.
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