The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

A long haul through 18th-century Polish Jewish history

The Books of Jacob is a novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a historical novel of deliberately epic proportions (about 1,000 pages), based on real lives and events. The novel opens in the 1750s. The story jumps back and forth quite a bit between Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and Germany (the Habsburg Monarchy). At that time, all of those political units were larger in land area and shared common borders with each other.

Jacob Frank (1726–1791) is Polish-born but seems to have been raised as a Turk within the Ottoman Empire. He is discovered by a group of Polish Jews, including some of his relatives, who think he is a new messiah for the Jewish people—a mantle that Jacob is ready and willing to adopt. His sect of followers—known as Sabbatians, anti-Talmudists, or Frankists—breaks from the orthodox beliefs of Judaism. They practice mysterious rites, some of them sexual, that just about everyone else finds sacrilegious. Jacob has heretical ideas of a holy trinity that includes himself. For their unorthodox views, the Frankists are violently persecuted by orthodox Jews and driven from town to town, country to country. To ensure their own safety, they court the protection of the Catholic Church, essentially striking a deal that they will all convert to Christianity (a big baptism bonanza for the Catholics) in exchange for the ability to settle and live peacefully. This provides a bit of a respite from their troubles, but not an end. (It’s a complicated history, and my summary is unavoidably an oversimplification for brevity’s sake.)

With historical novels, there is such a thing as being too faithful to real life. Tokarczuk goes into far more detail than necessary and drags this story out much longer than called for. She has obviously done much research, and perhaps in doing so she felt the need to cram every name, date, and note of correspondence she encountered into this book, when really some abridgment would have been welcome. Much of the plot is meeting after meeting and meal after meal with these characters, who talk about the same things over and over again, or write letters arguing the same points repeatedly. If ever a novel needed one of those cast-of-characters lists, it’s this one. New characters are constantly introduced who don’t seem to serve much purpose in the story. Other than three or four main characters, everyone else is difficult to tell apart. They all have at least two names, a Jewish name and a Christian name, and it’s hard to keep track of just how everyone is related.

I don’t know Tokarczuk’s religious views, but she is clearly fascinated by the history of this unusual religious sect. As a nonbeliever in any of the big-three theisms, however, I really couldn’t see why anyone considered Jacob a messiah in the first place. He has a natural charisma but doesn’t come across as particularly holy, miraculous, or even good. He reminds one of David Koresh. As messiah, he grants himself the right to take his followers’ wives, daughters, and in some cases sons, for his own pleasure. I kept hoping the congregation would wake up and realize Jacob’s a huckster and a rapist and take their revenge on him.

I do have an interest in Polish history and culture. I’ve read quite a bit of Polish literature and history books on Poland. I would have enjoyed a textbook chapter on Jacob Frank, however, more than I enjoyed Tokarczuk’s tedious rendering of this story. If you read a page at random, you’d find the writing quite adept and beautiful, but as a whole, this novel numbs the mind with hundreds of pages in which not much happens. The last 25% of the book, to be fair, is quite a bit more interesting and eventful than the three quarters that preceded it. In the end, however, I couldn’t help thinking I wasted an inordinate amount of time on a book that kept asking me to sympathize with a self-serving Tartuffe and his gullible disciples. I’ve previously read Tokarczuk’s Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; both are better than this.