Heroic work The Books of Jacob brings European Jewry to life

Perhaps the greatest work of 20th century Polish literature is a novel that no longer exists. Olga Togarczuk seeks to mend the holes in the fabric of history.

A visitor walks among barbed wire and prison barracks at the former Auschwitz I concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland.

Perhaps the greatest work of 20th century Polish literature is a novel that no longer exists. It was written by Bruno Schulz, a Galician-Jewish author and artist whose remaining writings consist of two short story collections, some letters, and a clutch of essays. Yet in the pre-war era he was regarded as a prose stylist of immense talent – the Polish love child of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – and a writer with an unillusioned love of the world in all its variousness.

World War II brought destruction to Poland’s Jewish population. For a time, Schulz survived the ghetto established in his hometown of Drohobycz by painting murals under the protection of an art-loving SS officer. Then he was shot dead in the street in 1942, at the age of 50, by another German officer in an act of spite. The saddest aspect of Schulz’s death is that the manuscript of a novel – a long work he had written entitled The Messiah – vanished along with its author. Only one other person is known to have read more than its opening lines. The work was never recovered.

It is worth lingering over this black hole at the heart of Poland’s literature when opening The Books of Jacob – the newly-translated novel by Nobel prize-winning author Olga Togarczuk – because her immense (992 pages) and immensely ambitious fiction is concerned, not only with the history of Jewish culture in Poland and Europe more broadly but specifically with the life of a would-be Jewish messiah: a real historical figure named Jacob Frank.

This is Togarczuk’s ninth novel, though only her fifth to be translated into English. It demanded immense research on the part of its author and took seven years to write. The expansiveness of the story that it relates – one that begins in 18th century Poland and concludes in the 20th century, and which moves from the frozen marshes of Eastern Ukraine to the sun-baked ports of Smyrna on the Mediterranean Sea, crossing nations, languages and the three great monotheistic religions – feels like a heroic act of homage, recuperation, and mourning.

The Books of Jacob.

While it is difficult to furnish a precis for a novel written on the scale of The Books of Jacob, its story is built from a panoptic view taken of Jacob Frank by multiple individuals – some real, some invented – over the course of the heretical impenitent’s life.

The action opens in the city of Rohatyn, midway through the 18th century – a time when Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity are reported in the local papers but Catholicism still rules the lives and thoughts of most.

The Jewish community of the city nestles uneasily within this larger whole. As the Rabbi Shorr, a central figure in these early chapters, points out: “We’re not allowed to buy land, settle down permanently. They chase us off in all directions, and in every generation there’s a disaster, a gezerah. Who are we, and what awaits us?”

It is the reader’s knowledge of what does await this community (first the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the rise of pogroms and racial science, and finally the murder of 99 per cent of Rohatyn’s 3000 strong Jewish community during the Holocaust) that lends an ache to the author’s recreation of their world. Togarczuk does a remarkable job of summoning the pungent, busy, disputatious yet utterly communal world of European Jewry to life.

Of all the notable qualities on display, it is a reverence for books and the learning they contain that is most prominent. Rabbi Shorr begins teaching the Torah to the children of his family from their earliest years, and there are countless instances in these pages of subtle and thrilling instances of exegesis drawn from religious literature, of secret knowledge embedded in a text.

“The book possesses a strange magic,” thinks Nahman ben Levi, Rabbi of Busk: “It can be read without pause, here, there, and something interesting always remains in one’s mind, giving one fantastic precepts for thinking of how great and complex this world is, so much so that one cannot possibly comprehend it in thought – no doubt only in fragments, the bits and pieces of small understandings.”

Nahman’s quest for understanding brings him into the orbit of Frank, recently returned from Salonika and Smyrna, with an already established reputation as a religious leader, albeit a curious one. Frank is a follower of Sabbatai Zevi and shares with that notorious would-be Jewish messiah a determination that true godliness arises from overturning traditional doctrine and law.

Frank and his followers will become ever more outrageous in their activities over the coming decades – embracing sexual licence and even converting to Islam and Catholicism. And while we are kept at a distance from Frank himself, seeing him mainly through the eyes of others, a picture builds of a charming, attractive, paradoxical man – part huckster and part sincere if unconventional seeker after truth, who will eventually be anointed as the new messiah by his Sabbatean followers.

He is, in other words a tremendously vivid vehicle for Togarczuk to explore the animating ideas of Europe’s religions as they meet and are altered by the emergence of the modern world.

Frank is a walking dualism, a final efflorescence of some mystical impulse old as the Jewish religion:

“Every place has two characters – every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark for the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The messiah is our doppelganger, a more perfect version of ourselves – he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

The structure of The Books of Jacob also defies the A to Zed logic of the modern world. It is riverine, folding back on itself: or else a crazy patchwork of ideas and languages and places and people held together by an omniscient narrator and the presence of a dying woman named Yente, whose spirit floats upward like a figure in a Chagall painting to witness the passage of her family from those earliest days at Rohatyn right up to the 20th century’s darkest moments. It is not a narrative to master but one to surrender to.

For all its sprawl, though, the total effect of the novel is that of connection. Like the braided genealogies of Poland’s Jewish families, people, things, places, objects and events seem to partake of some unity in these pages.

“I feel that the Godhead is broken up like bread at the Supper and that we are the pieces,” says the narrator of Moby Dick, one of Togarczuk’s favourite novels: “Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”

What Togarczuk seeks to achieve in these pages is to mend the holes in the fabric of history – to use words to find a proper meaning in the world and establish its underlying accordance.

It is a tribute to the immense, unprecedented quality of her undertaking that The Books of Jacob could serve as a worthy replacement for the lost work of Bruno Schulz.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.

The Books of Jacob

By Olga Togarczuk

Text
992pp, $34.99