She told me that it wasn’t that I was necessarily willing to have affairs, but that that line told her that I did have a tendency to forgive unfaithful men, to love them, even perhaps to the point of actively seeking them out in the wake of some infidelity.
Any believer knows that the lines of the palm are not a decree, but he also knows that the Creator makes no mistakes at the time when He determines how each and every one of us shall be formed.
It would take me another year or so to connect the dots and realize the evident implications of what the Kabbalistic palm reader sought to tell me.
That discovery happened as I was finishing my translation of a secondary text put together by Mario Bellatin to conclude a new Spanish edition of Jacob the Mutant.
There were so many readers fascinated by the events surrounding the compilation of those textual fragments of Joseph Roth’s novel The Border that the compiler himself, Mario Bellatin, felt obligated to write another text about those elements of Roth’s manuscript that did not make it (for some reason or another) into the first Spanish edition of the book.
As I went over the events that make up Jacob Pliniak’s biography—as well as that of his stepdaughter, Rose, both of whom are one and the same in this work of fiction—I once again took up my search for details regarding Rose Eigen.
Slowly I came to the realization that I am the reincarnation of Rose Eigen.
Since a young age, I’ve felt an undeniable and inexplicable draw to my Jewish roots. Something made all the more curious by the fact that I so much more easily could have remained within the Lutheran tradition inherited from my maternal side.
I could have maintained a connection similar to that into which Rosalyn Plinianson entered with Reverend MacDougal following her transformation.
From a young age I also felt the pressing and somewhat illogical need to live in New York City, perhaps guided by a need to recover some element of my familial past.
In the theology of reincarnation, as conceived of by the Kabbalists, the soul undergoes a constant process of transformation.
The Kabbalists assert that souls go through similar circumstances time and time again until they eventually correct each one of their flaws.
Although oftentimes the circumstances that accompany a reincarnation only exist for the sake of impeding the correction—or, tikkun—necessary for the soul to complete its reincarnation cycle and finally gain access to the Garden of Eden.
I’m unaware of the date on which Rose Eigen died. I only know that like Jacob Pliniak—the Galician rabbi who had to cross many borders in order to transmute into his stepdaughter, Rose Plinianson—Rose Eigen’s soul, too, had to wander. It had to be reborn into another life, one in which it would almost feel obligated to translate the contemporary writer Mario Bellatin. In this life, it appeared to be one of Rose Eigen’s missions to spread the doctrine of the Mariotic Theory to the English-speaking world.
The Mariotic Theory: Something that occurs each time a minimal, isolated incident breaks with an established order, followed by the emergence of a chain of uncontrollable chaos and increasingly absurd actions.
But is it so absurd that a woman who was denied forgiveness would have to reincarnate as her own great-grandson?
That she would return to this world to face off against unfaithful men and a series of doubts about the religion of her ancestors?
In another of the epilogues that I wrote for this translation (a text that, now that I am looking for it, I cannot find in any complete document; only fragments of it appear in various journals and folders), I said that the only mechanism for making sense of Jacob the Mutant was to give in to its perpetual state of transformation. To remain always a reader in continuous mutation.
I recall, too (although these texts have become somewhat blurry in my memory), having written something about the temporal, geographic, and linguistic borders that we must cross all the time in order to continue on with our lives in the way that they’ve been assigned to us.
BIOGRAPHIES
Mexican writer MARIO BELLATIN has published dozens of novellas on major and minor publishing houses in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Phoneme Media has published his novella Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, and will publish three more of his books through 2016, including The Uruguayan Book of the Dead, for which he won Cuba’s 2015 José María Arguedas Prize. Bellatin’s current projects include Los Cien Mil Libros de Bellatin, his own imprint dedicated to publishing 1,000 copies each of 100 of his books.
JACOB STEINBERG was born in Stony Brook, New York, in 1989. A poet, translator, and critic, his publications include Magulladón (2012) and Ante ti se arrodilla mi silencio (2013). As a translator, he has worked with Sam Pink, Luna Miguel, and Mario Bellatin, among others. Scrambler Books released his first English-language collection, Before You Kneels My Silence, as well as the first volume of his translations of contemporary Argentine poet Cecilia Pavón. He currently lives in New York.
ZSU SZKURKA is a Hungarian illustrator whose work explores the space between science and art. As a doctor that specializes in mental illness, her work explores the human form as observed in morgues, asylums, and sanitoriums, both in Hungary and Mexico, where she resides.
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