Reading The Books of Jacob As A Ukrainian

by Maria Genkin

Olga Tokarczuk’s glorious 900-page epic on the cult of Jacob Frank in 18th century Poland has finally reached English-speaking readers in the UK and the US. Having first read this book in Ostap Slyvynsky’s stellar Ukrainian translation, I am now slowly re-reading it in a translation by Jennifer Croft, a fantastic interpreter bringing Tokarczuk’s work to English readers. This time around I decided to join a reading club. The experience of reading it alongside readers who are removed from Central European history opened my eyes to how much they were struggling with the context of the novel. There is certainly plenty of material that any reader can appreciate without knowing all of the historical context. Still, some of the more crucial moments were misinterpreted by or confusing for my fellow readers.

Confusion over geography and history was further evident in reviews in the western press for the English translation. The New York Times review stated that Jacob Frank was “a young Jew who travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.” While Jacob indeed traveled through the Ottoman Empire and very briefly through the Habsburg Empire, most of his travels were actually through the Polish Commonwealth, which was still independent at the time of this story. The last partition of Poland took place in 1795, which is when some land described in the story became the Austrian Empire. Some parts, however, became a part of the Russian Empire. Many of the locations described in The Books of Jacob are located in modern-day Ukraine.

Yes–even that location where the statue of the Virgin Mary was placed on top of the minaret. It takes place in Kamianets-Podilsky, the northernmost reach of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.

Yes–even the location where Yenta lived and where she was placed in the cave. It is called Korolówka in the book, but Korolivka in Ukrainian. The village is located in Ternopil oblast’ in Ukraine. There are many Korolowka’s in Ukraine and Poland but Tokarczuk is describing the site of the Optimistic cave–the largest in Europe–where a family of Jews hid during the Holocaust. That family also has a role in the novel, serving as a reminder of what happened to the people Tokarzuk has so painstakingly brought back to life, the fate that Jacob Frank's followers escaped by assimilating.

One might finish reading this book without realizing that many of the events occur in Ukraine. For all the historical details, there is very little Ukrainian in it. The word 'Ukrainian' is not used once. However, this is because Tokarczuk is telling us a very specific story, that of the relationship between the Polish state, the Polish Church, and the Jewish minority. Additionally, the term 'Ukrainian' was not yet used in the middle of the 18th century to denote Ukrainians living in these territories.

Ukrainians living in the Polish Commonwealth were known at the time as Ruthenians. Suppose you know this and follow a description of Tokarczuk’s characters carefully. In that case, you discover that the Polish Commonwealth was populated not only by Jews and Poles, but by these mysterious others–Ruthenians, who were both commoners (peasants) and gentry.

We first encounter them in Rohatyn (now a city in Western Ukraine). This is one of the first scenes in the book, and what we see is a Babylon where hardly anyone speaks Polish as Elżbieta Drużbacka discovers:

“Does anyone here speak Polish?" she finally screams, furious with this crowd all around her and furious that this place is where she is. They say it is one kingdom, a united Commonwealth, but here everything is completely different from how it is in Greater Poland, where she comes from.

But the languages around are clearly not just Yiddish and Turkish. Roshko, a groom of Father Chmielowski, shouts: “Nu, poshli! Out of the way!” Jennifer Croft chooses not to translate this phrase literally; even though it could have been a Polish phrase, it never would have been used in this context. It is in Russian, which would be out of place in Rohatyn at that time. What is going on here? Is Roshko trying to communicate with Ukrainian peasants in broken Russian, perhaps? In the Ukrainian translation, Ostap Slyvynsky uses the Yiddish word Mentsch instead to convey the region’s linguistic diversity.

In Rohatyn, we meet one of the only Ruthenian characters—Hrycko—an interpreter between Elisha Shorr and Father Chmielowski, a boy with a Ruthenian lilt to his language who a Jewish family adopts. Father Chmielowski has not even realized that he would need an interpreter to speak with Jews. Hrycko, meanwhile, has his own difficulties interpreting Father Chmielowski’s Polish as he uses too many Latin words that a Ukrainian boy growing up in a Jewish family would not have heard (the tradition of liturgy in his Orthodox church would not include Latin).

Elisha Shorr has sheltered another goy in his house, a runaway that suffered extensive frost damage and thus has the appearance of a golem. We eventually get the story of this peasant who speaks decent Polish with just a slight Ruthenian accent. They arrive in a village near Ternopil (Tarnopol) as settlers–colonizers– from greater Poland, renting the land from the lord on the condition that they would need to repay for the fifteen years of relative freedom lease with slavery. This is a grim reminder of the serfdom/slavery that existed in the Polish Commonwealth and later in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the Revolution of 1848. My own family are descendants of these Polish peasants that must have come to our ancestral village in Podilia under similar circumstances. The Polish side of the family was wholly Ukrainianized by the 20th century, apart from religion. To this day, cemeteries in those villages are split along religious lines: here lie the Poles, and there lie the Ukrainians. But both sides lived in equal misery. This is a condition that even Elisha Shorr can’t help but empathize with:

“Shorr thinks that it is bad to be a Jew, that Jews have it hard in life, but that being a peasant is harder. There really is no fate worse than theirs. In that respect, Jews and peasants are equals, in the sense that they share the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation. Only vermin maybe ranked beneath them, Even cows and houses, and especially dogs, get better care.”

We can also note the presence of Ukrainians by the mention of their Orthodox faith. While the Polish Commonwealth created a unity of the Orthodox church with Catholicism, Orthodox communities were still very much distinct in the 18th century (and remain so to this day). When we survey the crowd on Rohatyn square and see “women in tattered rags gather dung and wood shavings for fuel,” Tokarczuk tells us that “It would be hard to say, based on their rags, whether this is a Jewish Poverty, or Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic.”

The Catholic Church's power over these lands that are mostly populated by non-Catholics is a major theme throughout the novel. Still, it is most apparent in the topic of Blood libel that is repeatedly addressed throughout.

Blood libel is the antisemitic belief  that Jews murder non-Jews, especially Christian children, in order to obtain their blood for Passover rituals. This belief has existed since Roman times and became prevalent during Medieval times, used as a pretext to drive Jews out of Western Europe. But the reason it is so important to the history of Ukraine can be found in more recent history.

On March 12, 1911, in Kyiv, a thirteen-year-old boy, Andrei Yushchinsky, went missing on his way to school. When his body was later discovered showing signs of mutilation, the old Blood libel beliefs were resurrected, and Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Hasidic Jew who worked nearby, was arrested. A number of the witnesses for the prosecution, including Justinas Pranaitis, a virulently antisemitic Catholic priest, testified that this was a ritual murder. The Beilis trial became a showcase of antisemitism in Europe. And although it was driven by the tsarist Russian state apparatus, it has long been attributed to Ukraine and the beliefs of Ukrainians.

What Tokarczuk does in The Books of Jacob is trace the roots of these beliefs, showing how the clergy was once of the forces that promoted them for centuries in Ukraine.

Consider the case of Bishop Ignacy Sołtyk, a Bishop in Kyiv and Chernihiv in the middle of the 18th century. In Tokarczuk’s interpretation, Soltyk was a card player frequently indebted to Jews. In order not to pay his debts, he uses the death of the boy killed and tortured in Zhytomyr (Zytomierz) as a pretense to arrest the family Jews that lent him money and execute them in a horrific way: “they were to be flayed alive, then quartered, their heads stuck on steaks, their quarters hung up.”

The boy, Stefan Studzinski, is then buried on church grounds with great solemnity as a Christian martyr. Curiously, Tokarczuk also mentions that some peasants, having found the child, carried him to their Orthodox church. Why is she being so specific? We do not know if this boy is Polish or Ukrainian. What we do know that Bishop Soltyk's actions have an impact on Ukrainian peasants in this area–they see the victim, they see the execution of the Jews for this order, and thus they are conditioned to hate the Jews by those that pull the strings.

Tokarczuk then returns to the theme of Blood libel when describing Asher's origin; he is a Jew that followed a path of enlightenment and science before settling in Lviv (Lwow). An Orthodox priest becomes upset with Asher's father for cutting off his vodka. A body in a hunting bag is dropped off at Asher's father's place, and he is immediately accused of Blood libel. Once again, a trial foreshadowing the Beilis affair ensures.

But then the Blood libel is used by Frankists to distinguish themselves from those other Jews, the Talmudists, that do not believe in Jacob as the Messiah. The followers of Jacob Frank allege that Blood libel is true, and in another–the most shocking episode–kill a boy and point the finger at local Jews with whom they were quarreling. Prejudice and fear, it seems, are used by everyone to achieve their goals.

And then, of course, there is also the mention of those other Ukrainians—the Cossacks. While they rarely appear in the story (the tsars had pretty much wiped them out by the mid-18th-century), the memory of the previous catastrophes brought on by the Cossacks, especially during Khmelnytsky’s uprising, is very much alive in these Jewish communities. It is, in fact, one of the reasons for the development of these messiah cults that started with Shabbetai Tzvi and ended with Frank. Frank, curiously enough, has some Cossack blood in him, a grim reminder of what generations of his ancestors went through in these lands that are supposed to be Paradisus Judaeorum.

The Books of Jacob is a massive epic that consists of hundreds of characters coming in and out of focus. Readers can enjoy the novel without taking a deep dive into the history and geography of the region that serves as its foundation. Still, all these historical and geographical details explain one of the novel's central themes: Poland was a colonial power that ruled over the territories where a majority of the population was not Polish. The Catholic Church was one of the main tools used for assimilating the people of those territories. Instead of peaceful coexistence, people often lived in misery, and their only way out of that misery was the adoption of Polish political and religious identity.

All of these revelations runs contrary to the politics of the current Polish ruling party Law and Justice that would like to view old Great Poland as something to aspire to, and Olga Tokarczuk's voice is one of the fiercest in her opposition to their nationalist agenda.

According to The New Yorker's 2019 profile on Olga Tokarzcuk, the relationship between Poles and Ukrainians is central to the novel that she is currently working on. What part of our collective history has she chosen for this novel? Will it look back on history, as does The Books of Jacob, to examine the roots of this relationship and perhaps to provide a counter-balance to the highly nationalistic and revered novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz? Or will she look at the more recent history of Polish-Ukrainian relations during the inter-war period when Poles attempted “Polonizing” the minority with increasing force, only to have that minority rebel and become more aware of its distinct identity? Will she talk about the massacres committed at the end of the Second World War and the repartitions of Poles and Ukrainians under the Yalta agreements?

Tokarzcuk’s ancestors on her father’s side include Poles and Ukrainians (or Ruthenians as they were called), and pulling these identities apart is no easy task. The author has said that "this distinction—who is Polish and who is Ukrainian—is for me very artificial." If I were to guess, her next book will likely focus on this.