The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

Author:Olga Tokarczuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2021-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Which, in the language of the Sephardim, means:

Give us the power to see thee

and the great fortune to serve thee.

And now everyone is singing “para verti,” the whole barn, their voices uniting into something singular and strong, leaving no room for and no memory of Yankiel of Glinno and his bad news.

Nahman and his very young wife, Wajgełe, whose nickname is the Little Ant, have taken Yankiel in. Sometimes, pretending to be asleep, Yankiel eavesdrops on his arguing hosts; she wants to go back to Busk. She is very thin and prone to fevers and coughs.

The fact that they all have to go through the motions of accepting the Nazarene faith and acting more Christian than the Christians themselves strikes Yankiel as dishonest. It is fraud. He likes having to live piously, humbly, not saying much, keeping his thoughts to himself. The truth should be in your heart, not on your lips. And yet: converting to Christianity!

Nahman dispels his doubts: accepting the Christian faith does not mean becoming Christian. They cannot, for instance, marry Christian women, or even have concubines from among them, for although Señor Santo Baruchiah repeated: “Blessed is he who permits all forbidden things,” he also said that the daughter of a foreign God is forbidden.

Yankiel of Glinno is mostly impervious to these arguments. That’s how he is—he never goes too close to anything, standing instead to one side, not listening to the teachings but leaning up against a tree, against the doorframe, as if he were just pausing for a moment on his way out. He observes. Two years have passed since his wife’s death, and he, a rabbi living on his own in poverty-stricken Glinno, has endured much angst over one Christian woman, older than he, a governess on an estate near Busk. They met by accident. The woman was sitting on the riverbank, dipping her feet in the water. She was naked. When she saw Yankiel, she simply said, “Come here.”

As he always does when he gets nervous, Yankiel plucked a blade of grass and put it in between his teeth—he believes this heightens his selfconfidence. Now he knows that he should have turned on his heels and vanished from the sight of this shiksa, but in the moment, he could not take his eyes off her white thighs, he was suddenly seized by such an intense desire that in some sense he simply lost his mind. It also excited him that they were shielded from view by reeds as tall as walls and that the marshes smelled of rot and silt. Every particle of the hot air felt swollen, full, and juicy like a cherry, and soon it would burst, and its juice would spill onto their skin. A storm was coming.

He crouched shyly by the woman and saw that she was no longer young, that her breasts, full and white, hung down, and that her stomach, slightly protruding, with a birthmark on her navel, was cut across by a fine line that has been impressed into her skin by her skirt.

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