Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, Chapters 13-15

Join me in this slow read along of the Nobel Prize-winning decade-defining book.

Welcome to the Slow Read Along of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. You read along at your own pace, and I guide you through the story, its many characters, and rich historical and cultural context.

You can check back and catch up on the whole Slow Read of The Books of Jacob, with lists of characters and guides to context on my Slow Read page.

Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018.

Critics described The Books of Jacob as a “decade-defining book.”

The adventure is gathering pace. As I mentioned last week, I am picking up the pace of the slow read to guide you through three chapters a week, or about fifteen pages each day if you read a little six days a week.

This week I am making the whole post available with no paywall. It gives all readers a chance to see what you get for being a paid subscriber.

Special Note for New Readers and Subscribers

If you are checking in on the Slow Read of The Books of Jacob for the first time, check these guides to this fantastic journey through history, the best historical fiction of the twenty-first century, in my opinion.

• 13 January - Tips on how to do the 'slow read' of The Books of Jacob

• 20 January - An overview of the characters of The Books of Jacob

• 27 January - Historical context of the 'Other Europe' in The Books of Jacob

A Polish Princess and Shapes of the New Better

“Maybe there are some truths that elude the capacity of reason, maybe not everything can be contained within the Scriptures, maybe a new entry needs to be created for his Gitla, something about people like her. Maybe she actually is a Polish princess, in her soul.”

(Tokarczuk, Books of Jacob, p. 678)

This week I guide you through chapters 13 to 15 from the start of The Book of the Road. This Book recounts Jacob’s return to Podolia and the growth of his religious community.

Chapter 13 has nine sections. It begins in 1755 when plague struck Poland, while Jacob and his followers walked the road from the Turkish border to the Polish towns where their heresies will be revealed to the world. We see Jacob through the eyes of spies, and the sceptical mind of Sobla, who is caring for the holy woman, Yente. In Lwów, many of the prosperous Jewish community deride Jacob’s proclamation of himself as Messiah. But others are drawn to his “strange, almost inconceivable gift.” Among those attracted to Jacob are “the Lord’s female guardians” who serve both as his security detail and his sexual companions. The Frankists engage in semi-religious, group sexual practices in “some secret acts in Lanckoroń.” But a member of the orthodox Jewish community spies them. One of the guardians, who by Jacob’s side “has been like a she-wolf, right up until that calamitous night in Lanckoroń” (p. 678) is Gitla Pinkasówna. Gitla is the daughter of Pinkas, the secretary to the rabbi of Lwów. It is Gitla who despite reason may actually be a Polish princess, in her soul.

Chapter 14 has eleven sections. Bishop Dembowski discusses the Jewish heresy spreading in Polish towns, and his frustrated schemes to expel all the Jews. Father Chmielowski and Elzbieta Drużbacka exchange correspondence on poetry and how women manage the households of the Polish nobility. The reports of that calamitous night in Lanckoroń make their way to Gitla’s father’s boss, who relieves the ashamed father of his duties because of his daughter’s heresy and madness. On Pinkas’s initiative, the orthodox Jews of Poland pronounce a curse, a herem, on Frank and his followers, including Gitla. Meanwhile, Bishop Dembowski, his “imagination on fire,” conceives a scheme to exploit the Lanckoroń scandal and to convert the Jewish heretics. He writes to his patron Bishop Sołtyk of his dreams to serve his ecclesiastical ambition and Poland’s imperial glory.

If this were to come to Fruition, the Feat of it would gain Poland Renown all around the world—that in the Holy Commonwealth we managed to convert the Pagans without going all the Way to India, instead converting our very own local Savages.”

(Tokarczuk, Books of Jacob, p. 648)

Chapter 15 is shorter with five sections. The curse, herem, pronounced on Jacob’s followers begins to remake their world. Gitla is banished and falls into prostitution at the end of chapter 14. Jacob, Elisha Shorr and Nahman see the Shekhinah in the new Christian statue of Holy Mary that the Poles erected over an old minaret in Kamieniec. They open themselves to negotiations with the resentful, sectarian, untrustworthy Dembowski to convert to Christianity. One leading follower, Krysa, dreams of receiving land from the Christian Polish nobles where their small community can lead a dignified, independent, and free life on the land. Elisha Shorr’s most loved daughter, Hayah, who was at the centre of the group sex scandal of Lanckoroń, feels herself part of the mystery of the Shekhinah. She has two natures: “the matriarch, an eldest daughter who has taken on the obligations of a mother” and “daytime Hayah, sunny and bright.” Hayah gives herself to Jacob, and her father sees the shapes of the new letters found in Chmielowski’s New Athens. At the end of the chapter, Jacob defies his followers’ practical schemes. He decides on a great betrayal of his faith.

You’ll see, all of you. The bishop and I have an understanding.

Jacob, The Books of Jacob, p. 627

Chat and Comment Question

This week, I am opening up my chat/comment question to all readers. It is Mental Health Awareness Month in the USA. We promote mental health awareness in October down under. Olga Tokarczuk was a clinical psychologist before making her career as a writer. The experience gave her acute insight into mental illness, and character, and exquisite sensitivity to the subtlety of its stories.

My chat and comment question takes up that theme of mental illness in fiction, as represented in the story of the Polish Princess, in her soul, Gitla Pinkasówna.

What are some of the best representations of mental illness in fiction or historical novels?

You can respond to this chat question in the comments section.

I look forward to reading your experiences, insights, and perspectives.

For paid subscribers below I have some additional notes to enrich your Slow Read.

• character - Gitla Pinkasówna, the Polish Princess in her own mind

• context - the real incident at Lanckoroń on which Tokarczuk based her story.

Please upgrade your subscription to get the most from your reading of The Books of Jacob, guided by a little bit of imaginative, cultured world history.

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Character - Gitla Pinkasówna

Polish National Theatre performance on The Books of Jacob, showing from the left, Gitla, Asher, Hrycko, Elisha Shorr, and Nahman

Gitla Pinkasówna was my favourite character in the novel. The story of her relationship with her father, Pinkas, and the kindly Asher Rubin is profoundly moving. The novel will trace her transformation from, in The Book of the Road, the adolescent girl who believed herself to be a Polish Princess and bonded sexually with the charismatic Jacob, to, at the novel’s end, a scholar reading Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” in Vienna coffeehouses.

We first meet her as one of the Lord’s female guardians, who claims descent from Polish-Lithuanian royalty. She tells “everyone she was the great-granddaughter of the king of Poland, and that her father had found her in a basket lined with swan’s down, and that a swan had even nursed her with its milk.” (p. 679) But the scandal of Lanckoroń lays her low, and the curse, initiated by her own father, nearly destroys her. Hayah tells her rival guardian to leave Jacob’s house, and to return to her father, begging forgiveness.

Gitla returns to Lwów and watches the community that had cursed her. She hears women at the synagogue lament the fate of her father. But Gitla cannot overcome the curse Pinkas brought down on her head. She falls into poverty, begging and prostitution.

Slowly she reconciles herself to the thought that she looks like a harlot—dirty, with matted hair, and hungry. And suddenly she feels absolutely free. She goes into the first decent courtyard she comes across and up the first decent building, and then she climbs the stairs to the first floor and knocks on the first decent-looking door she encounters.

(Tokarczuk, Books of Jacob, p. 643)

That door is opened by a stooping man with glasses, who we met in the first chapter of the novel, Asher Rubin, the Jewish doctor and lens grinder of Rohatyn.

“What do you want?” he asks in a hoarse, low voice, and reflexively starts searching for groszy to give her alms.

“I am the great-granddaughter of the Polish king,” says Gitla. “I am looking for a decent place where I can spend the night.”

(Tokarczuk, Books of Jacob, p. 643)

Rubin admits her, cares for her, and learns that maybe there are some truths that elude the capacity of reason, and maybe Gitla is a Polish princess, in her soul. One act of freedom and one act of mercy will take Gitla and Asher Rubin all the way to the central European Enlightenment.

Context - Scandal of Lanckoroń

The sexual scandal in Lanckoroń catalysed Gitla’s ruin and Jacob’s conversion. Like so many stories in The Books of Jacob, this event is a well-documented historical event. Simon Schama, Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492 —1900 provides the story without Tokarczuk’s fiction, and with his own form of historical magic.

When Jacob Leibovich, later Frank, crossed the Polish border in 1755 he unwittingly re-entered the Jewish community during a time of “crisis and consternation.” How should the Jewish community deal with the Shabbetean heresies that were common especially in Podolia? The Jewish Council of the Four Lands was divided. Some wanted to root out the heresy. Others wanted to let the sleeping dogs of “underground Shabbateanism stay that way rather than risk fracturing the community.”

The scandal of Lanckoroń exploded in this crisis and consternation. Schama writes:

But at the end of January 1756, something happened in the small town of Lanckoronie on the Moldavian border which ruled out an expedient solution. On the night of 27-28 January, someone had peered through the gaps in drapes covering the windows of a certain house and spied a group of twelve to fifteen men, including Jacob Frank himself, singing and dancing in a Shabbatean ritual. Many of the accounts, written up much later, reported that song and dance was the least of it. Jacob Emden, writing just four years on, and in a prosecutorial vein, had a more colourful story to tell. But his account was supported by that of a local Christian canon dating from only a year after the scandalous event. They described the local rabbi’s wife [Hayah], seated as if on a throne, either half or fully naked (depending on the account) wearing a Torah crown on her head. Every so often the men dancing in a circle about her would stop and kiss her breasts, calling her their mezuzah - the miniature tablet fixed to Jewish doorposts containing verses from the Torah. The ritual was obviously based on Shabbetai’s own notorious ‘wedding’ to the Torah, enacted under a canopy in the Smyrna synagogue during Hannukah in which he took the mystic marriage of Jews with the Torah literally. During the processing of the Sefer Torah in synagogue before and after readings, it is customary to touch the covered scrolls with the fringe of a worshipper’s prayer shawl and kiss it. At Lanckoronie, the ‘Torah bride’ had been replaced by an actual bride, notwithstanding her marriage to the rabbi. Jacob Frank’s style was to turn matters from the poetic to the physical. Some reports also claimed that the orgiasts had worn the cross around their necks.

(Schama, Belonging, pp. 446-447)

The scandal spread beyond the Jewish community and engaged the Christians who, like Bishop Dembowski, were on the hunt for incriminating claims against the Jews. Investigations began that revealed a “whole network of Shabbateans throughout Podolia.” The investigation led to the curse.

At the conclusion of the proceeedings in the middle of June 1756, a herem excommunication was passed on the miscreants, most dramatically on Joseph of Rohatyn who was given the same punishment as Uriel da Cosa - the thirty-nine lashes and laid at the threshold of the synagogue so that members of the congregation could tread on him as they exited. He was ordered to divorce the wife who had slept with strangers on his instructions, his children were declared bastards, and he was banished, to be sent as a criminal wanderer out into the wilderness.

(Schama, Belonging, p. 448)

The curse would lead to the catastrophes that followed the dispute between the orthodox Jews and excommunicated anti-Talmudists. The dispute coincided with the start of the Seven Years War, which Winston Churchill called the first world war.

And we will tell that story next week.

I hope all my readers enjoyed this week’s Slow Read post. You can check back and catch up on the whole Slow Read of The Books of Jacob, with lists of characters and guides to context on my Slow Read page.

Please join me as a paid subscriber to enjoy all the fantastic journeys of The Books of Jacob and the Burning Archive.

Thanks for reading

🙏❤️🌏

Jeff