In the early pages of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, an old woman is inconveniently dying. Yente’s impending death casts a shadow over a large wedding hosted by the Shorr family of Rohatyn–she lays upstairs under piles of coats as guests dance below, shaking the walls. But Yente does not die. Her body shrivels, her blood barely runs, yet she goes on, keeping a watchful eye over the nine-hundred plus pages of Tokarczuk’s novel, a historical opus that won Poland’s prestigious Nike Prize in 2015 and contributed to her Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

The Books of Jacob follows the improbable but true story of Jacob Frank, a Jewish merchant born in 1762, who later became a messianic figure and leader. Under Frank’s influence, his followers converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, seeking both salvation and assimilation into the 18th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multiethnic state with legalized freedom of religion but limited tolerance for minorities, as Tokarczuk writes. Upon converting to the official and majority religion, Catholicism, and learning Polish, Frank’s followers in Tokarczuk’s novel, like the historical Frankists, are eligible to own land, educate their children, open shops, gain titles and claim nobility, and most essentially, Tokarczuk writes, “become people.” The implication being, that as Jews, they were not seen as such, and instead “share[d] the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation.” Tokarczuk’s Frank teaches his followers to break through the established order and find the sacred within the profane. They feast on fast days, reject the commandments, and engage in rituals that shock both Christians and Jews. They practice adultery. They drink milk from a woman’s breast. They create a community at Ivanie and live out Frank’s teachings among themselves. Yet the Frankists do eventually find acceptance and protection at the highest rungs of Polish society–those glad to save non-Christian souls. Polish King Augustus III himself stood as the historical and fictional Frank’s godfather at his baptism in Warsaw. 

Tokarczuk writes about Frank and his followers using a technique also employed in her 2018 Man Booker Prize winning novel Flights: a constellation of varied perspectives and narrative threads that coalesce into one cosmic story–overseen by Yente, who “reads” the world from her resting place in a deep cave that leads to the center of the world and the burial place of Abraham. While the text is made up of a pastiche of letters, diary entries, court proceedings, poetry, and images as well as straightforward narration, there remains an untouchable other plane of existence, accessible only to Tokarczuk, Yente, and possibly Frank, if we are to believe he is the “holy fool” he claims to be. He remains ambiguous throughout–a man of action in the purest sense–we do not know of his intentions, only of his tastes in food, sex, and prayer as well as the ailing of his body. We never know his mind; his perspective is not included. Instead we hear from those closest to him, such as the disciple and scribe Nahman, who struggles between his faith in Frank and his frustration at trying to narrate the unexplainable, to justify Frank’s teachings and prove that he is worthy of the title of Messiah. Yente, whose father knew Sabbatai Zevi, one of the most notorious false messiahs in Jewish history, describes the true nature of a messiah. A Messiah is not a mortal man, she tells us, but an idea “that flows in your blood, resides in your breath,” it is the precious, fragile promise of salvation. Tokarczuk’s multivarious articulations of Jewish mysticism throughout the novel allow her to alternate between playful metaphors and prose as sleek as cold water, crystallized in English through Jennifer Croft’s skillful translation. Tokarczuk describes the Messiah as “a delicate plant” to be tended to, and at the same time, a “dark mill standing over a river,” a force both irresistible and insatiable.

The constellation of perspectives surrounding Frank, including those of Polish nobles, oppositional rabbis, clergymen, and followers, are formed into a narrative by Yente’s all-seeing eye, which allows Tokarczuk to marry the material with the mystical. In her 2019 Nobel Prize speech, “The Tender Narrator,” Tokarczuk speaks of aspiring to a new kind of narration, a fourth person narrator, one who “manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time.” Yente, the woman who cheats death, is able to ignore time and space, the traditional building blocks of narrative. She is like that very first narrator, who Tokarczuk calls the “marvelous storyteller” of the Bible, the one who knows the world before it is formed, and who has access to the creator as they create. Tokarczuk’s fourth person narrator is concerned less with the supernatural, and more with the “natural” world: all the things that make up our planet, from animals to human beings to the “modest little lives” of objects, which, as a child Tokarczuk believed had “their own problems and emotions.” Yet portraying these disparate lives becomes a problem of scale. Instead of following a linear narrative then, Tokarczuk links narrative fragments, allowing them to reference one another without accounting for the gaps. These fragments act as points on a larger map that will reveal the cosmic framework that encompasses and accounts for everything within it, revealing the world to be a “living, single entity” that requires our care and attention. This connectedness echoes throughout The Books of Jacob. As a Rohatyn vicar states, there is “a sort of hidden order that–were it more visible and consistent–might lead people to live more virtuous lives.” And as Nahman writes, “Certain facts have been concealed from us, no doubt, and this is why we cannot assemble the world as we know it into a single whole. There has to be a secret somewhere to explain it all.” This secret order has a nonhuman quality to it, which fascinates Tokarczuk, and is reflected in her metaphors: as when a breeze sets the lace trimming of a dress in motion, wavering “like anemones in a temperate sea.” If Tokarczuk can narrativize, and thus account for this hidden connectedness, it becomes revealed as our collective duty, and creates a “completely different kind of responsibility for the world.” Her fourth person narrator shows us how to live with tenderness:

Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time…It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself…The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of nowhere…That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.

The Books of Jacob, though ostensibly a historical novel, does not dispel with Tokarczuk’s contemporary line of critique about our relationship to the natural world. In a chapter of Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, critic Bożena Karwowska writes that Tokarczuk “interrogate[s] the limitations of symbolic cultural orders” and “creates and posits new views of the world with each new work.” Karwowska also writes that Tokarczuk “constantly oppose[s] what is symbolically marked as male.” We see this in her eco-thriller, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, where Tokarczuk describes the pulpit–where the priest preaches and the hunter preys–as vantage points from which men allow themselves authority over life and death, becoming both “tyrant and usurper.” In the 18th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, men (and I do mean men) carve up the earth “like the corpse of an animal,” while Grandmother Yente can see the world from on high, where it is still whole as “a freshly shelled green pea.” The Frankists’ communal village of Ivanie seeks, in some ways, to return to the world order that predates this man-made destruction. And despite its ostensible focus on Frank, The Books of Jacob becomes most tender when it gives the narrative over to women, such as his daughter, who after a life of wandering becomes the Frankists’ leader after his death, or Yente’s narration as she watches over the Frankists and articulates their ambiguous position:  

“They are supposed to be Jews, but to Jews they’re not Jews, for they are persecuted by their own, cursed, belonging nowhere. And in their distress, their dark souls, like potato shoots growing in a cellar, instinctively seek out the light and lean toward it, poor things.”

Tokarczuk’s metaphor, that of tender green shoots in the darkness, speaks of her sympathy for the Frankists, who attempt to replace the old laws of Judaism with even older ones, harkening to a time when, “Everything was held in common, everything belonged to everyone, and everyone had enough, and the commandments ‘Thou shalt not steal’ and ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ didn’t exist because if anyone had said them, nobody else would have understood…” Of course, this is not so simple to achieve: the Frankists face opposition from other Jews, who see them as sinners, and look with horror on their radical acts, such as burning the Talmud. And Christians continue to look at the Frankists with suspicion, wondering, “Where has their Jewishness gone? [They] cannot see it in their appearances or in their manners…These people are from everywhere and nowhere. The future of humanity.” At stake in their conversion is the loss of Jewish cultural and symbolic differentiation from Polish Catholics. Shorn of their difference, dissolved into the multi-ethnic state, the Church and Commonwealth is potentially divested of its enemy and other. As Tokarczuks writes: Jews are the scapegoat who can be blamed when no other cause of misfortune can be found. The fragmentation of perspective allows Tokarczuk to expose the tensions that exist within the Commonwealth, where minorities like Jews lived and worked among Polish Catholics but also faced plague, poverty, and pogrom. But Turks, Ruthenians, Armenians and Jews also create the culture in far-flung cities such as Rohatyn, in what is now Western Ukraine. “Does anyone here speak Polish?” Tokarczuk has a visiting noblewoman exclaim, unable to find her place in the busy bustle of the marketplace.  

Tokarczuk’s willingness to look at the darker aspects of Polish history has made her a target for Polish right-wing nationalists. As a leftist, atheist, vegetarian, and human and animal rights advocate in a country that has taken a hard right turn, Tokarczuk has received death threats for her comments about Poland’s history of colonization, antisemitism, and serfdom. However as a novelist, her narrative vision stretches beyond national borders, or man-made problems. After all, as she writes in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, “it’s plain to see the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure,” “it shows us how very hostile to us it is,”  and “one day it will get rid of us entirely.” Here, Tokarczuk negates the role of humans in redeeming the Earth: it was here long before us and will remain long after, it is ourselves that we destroy. Nature goes on. 

In Tokarczuk’s Nobel Speech, Croft has translated as “tender” the Polish word “czuły,” which can also translate to “feeling,” or “sensitive”–all words that do not necessarily correspond to human empathy or care. A plant can be sensitive to light. Water feels and responds to a tremor under the sea floor in the form of a wave. Tokarczuk’s constellationary narratives relegate us to our proper place, among plants and animals and things, not above them. Though Tokarczuk cannot solve the mystery of our interconnectedness, cannot reveal the hidden order of life, she can at least draw our eye to it through Yente’s global vision. She sees Jacob rise, gather followers, land in prison, and get set free, and she witnesses his death. She goes on, annulling time, encompassing all space, watching our human joys and sorrows, our careless destruction of the planet, our eventual disappearance, with her tender, watchful eye.