tolerance is not easy and not for granted. It is to be defended as a cultural achievement, and must, against the temptation of dogmatism – “And you don’t want to be my brother / then I beat you in the head” – again and again. Towards the end of Olga tokarczuk’s monumental novel “The time of Jacob’s books,” contends Moliwda, an important supporting character, with his brother about it. For the brother, a bigoted officer, there is no doubt that “salvation is solely by the Holy Roman Church. Understanding of the Luther’s, the Jews, the Arians – hatching the whole devil? Where would we go?” His brother, whose life path has led a Christian cult and a heretical Jewish group back to Catholicism, by contrast, is convinced that “there is a God, but a Wealth of opportunities, to believe in him”.
Olga Tokarczuk has experienced intolerance first-hand. After she had received for the “Jacob books” the most important literary prize of your country called on you in the thank-you speech to your countrymen, to remember the dark pages of the past, as Poland “colonizers, slave-owners and Jew-killers were”. In a period of officially-powered politics of history, after Poland, only the heroes or the victims were, it was pure blasphemy. Tokarczuk has been referred to as a traitor, for a while she got the protection of people. The Nobel prize has changed some; now even the ruling, Poland is proud of “his” great author.
“Jacob books” are also a piece of history-politics, but anti-dogmatic. Tolerance is not for Olga Tokarczuk only a matter of content – “Polish history without Jewish history is conceivable,” she says – it is a question of Form. The Narrative Perspective. The story of Jacob Frank, which tells of almost 1200 pages, reverse numbered pages, out of respect for the Jewish books, we do not hear of an omniscient narrator. Olga Tokarczuk breaks often, like a beam of light and sends it through a Prism.
Jakob Frank is a rogue and a seducer, a madman and a Domineering, a strategist and Erotomaniac.
This Frank, a rogue and a seducer, a madman and a Domineering, a strategist and Erotomaniac, is in any case an ambivalent, elusive figure. He lived from 1726 to 1791, declared himself the Messiah and led his followers out of the Jewish Orthodoxy, and to the baptism. He was thus between all the chairs – the “Talmudisten” pursued him, the Catholics imprisoned him, too, but the persecutions and brought it to Brno, to a splendid, at the end of his life in the Hessian Offenbach to a still-respectable court.
We learn from him about the letters exchanged between the nobility, ladies, and bishops, lots of hear say, he is the object of disputes and plans; the author makes him even occur, always in a different lighting. She gives him a faithful companion, Nachman, a Rabbi of Busk, he follows his “Lord” over all the stations of his journey (many of these stations belong to what was in the Second world war, to the “blood lands”) and records everything that happens to him. He is to a certain extent, of Jacob, the Evangelist. Not quite so faithfully his gospel, device, Nachman is an “unreliable narrator” avant la lettre. Because he has, like all in this rich tableau, his own interests, his own view of things
Nachman has learned the legendary Made, the Hasidic preacher Baal Shem tov, to find the truth in the characters. He is a Kabbalist, one who “pierced in the words holes and into the unfathomable Depths inside looks”, the reading from the Hebrew letters and their numerical value, prophecies and events in the life in the “big Plan” files that the Creator intends to do with humanity, and in particular of course with the Jews.
practiced erotic rites
in The Poland of the 18th century. The hotel is in an apocalyptic mood; the misery is so great, that the Messiah must come. On Jacob, so huge hopes are projecting; and the use of them, a clever Manipulator that he is, to his Best and, perhaps, for the salvation of mankind, or at least his entourage. The strange, but also terrible consequences. He celebrates “strange deeds”: The Jewish laws must not only ignored, they must be reversed. He practices erotic rites and pairs formed as a Guru, men and women sex. He takes, who he just is.
Fatal, but In a Disputation in the Cathedral of Lviv, he claims, based on false sources, the Talmud require Christian blood for certain rituals; the feeds long-existing prejudices. Twice Olga Tokarczuk tells how Jews tortured due to such false accusations, condemned, and cruelly executed.
Yes, the glorious “noble Republic” of the 18th century. Century, the glorified, today’s Poland like, for the vast majority of little gloriously. Not for the Jews, and certainly not for the peasants. In a story within a story, Olga Tokarczuk recounts the terrible fate of “Jan from Okno”, the family must provide seven days per week labor. He will be punished after a first escape attempt difficult, the second almost beaten to death, in the woods as a frozen left and the Jews saved.
He declared himself the Messiah, Jacob Frank (1726-1791).
Therefore, the Converted struts quite a piece of private Land to Jacob Frank pursues this objective is quite consistent, whether or not in correspondence with the Ottoman Sultan, or in discussions with the Habsburg Emperor; of Herzl’s Palestine-the dream is still nothing to suspect. But under the protection of Polish landlords, you definitely do not want: Since it is only the farmer threatens them but misery.
The life of a Jewish Sectarian and his entourage in front of a Quarter of a Millennium: That seems a very remote Roman motif and leads in most current debates. Here, the Foreign, the Established. A world in upheaval; the usual Old dissolves, the New is not yet in sight. Scouts appeal to the mind, populists to the feeling. Conspiracy theories make the rounds. Anyone who takes the time for this novel, those with the patience for a complex to Happen with the myriad of Stakeholders that will be rewarded with a long journey in a time that appears at the same time foreign and familiar.
Frank’s skull was not the Nazi’s as proof of the inferiority of the Jewish race
a higher-level narrative instance, the author omitted the way it is. But there is a magic instance: is the old Jenta, can not die, because she has swallowed a piece of paper with a magic formula. You can see everything that is happening and sees everything. As a re-pogroms threaten, hide bot related in the cave of Korolowka, the, Jacob Frank, at the same time, the cave of the patriarchs in Hebron, in the deep down Adam and eve are buried, and the – is the now historically – during the German occupation of 38 Jews shelter; all survived. The Olga Tokarczuk told, likewise, that the skull of the real Jacob Frank Nazi science served learning as evidence for the inferiority of the Jewish race.
“The world demands to be told,” says the chronicler, and the word speculator Nachman once. And “Tell the world of your change is”. A piece of this Messianic hope should have also received in Olga Tokarczuk, otherwise you would not have shouldered this monumental undertaking.
Olga Tokarczuk: The Jakob books. Roman. From the Polish by Lisa Palmes and Lothar Quinkenstein. Kampa, Zurich, 2019. 1180 p., approx. 55 Fr.
Created: 09.12.2019, 22:28 PM