The Books of Jacob

Jacob Frank and His Movement

Jacob Frank was born Yankev Leibowicz in 1726 in Korolówka, a small town in Podolia — a region that is now Ukraine, was then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and was home to one of the largest and most culturally complex Jewish populations in the world. He was a merchant’s son who traveled widely in Ottoman territories, absorbed a syncretic mysticism that drew on Kabbalah and Sabbateanism (the movement of the previous false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi), and returned to Poland in the 1750s radiating charisma and conviction.

What Frank asked of his followers was extraordinary: he required them to convert — first to Islam, then to Catholicism — while maintaining that these conversions were themselves the path to liberation, a descent through other faiths that would eventually yield a secret truth beyond all of them. His followers, the Frankists, numbered in the tens of thousands at the movement’s height. They endured disputation with rabbinical authorities, imprisonment, the charge of ritual murder (the blood libel), and Frank’s own long confinement in the Jasna Góra monastery — where he continued to hold court and to attract followers. He eventually settled in Offenbach, Germany, where he died in 1791, still maintaining the fiction of messianic authority.

Tokarczuk’s Frank is not quite a fraud and not quite a prophet — he is something the novel refuses to fully resolve, a man of genuine power whose ends were self-serving and whose followers’ longing was genuine. The novel’s sympathy is with the followers: the ordinary Jews of eighteenth-century Poland who had suffered enough that the promise of a way out, any way out, was worth almost any cost.

Tokarczuk’s Method

The novel’s formal ambitions are as large as its historical ones. Tokarczuk narrates through dozens of perspectives — rabbis, Polish noblewomen, Frankist followers, Catholic priests, a fictional old Jewish woman who is also the novel’s primary narrator and who observes the story from a position outside time. Some sections are written to be read right to left, following the direction of Hebrew text. The novel includes maps, genealogies, and illustrations. It is, in its form, an enactment of the eighteenth-century world it describes: a world of competing directions, languages, religions, and interpretive frameworks, in which no single perspective has authority.

The historical research behind the novel took Tokarczuk years. She has spoken of being obsessed with the Frankists — with a chapter of Jewish Polish history that was largely erased from memory, partly by the Frankists’ own conversions (which removed them from Jewish communal records) and partly by the Holocaust, which destroyed the communities that might have preserved it. The novel is, among other things, an act of recovery: an attempt to restore to visibility a world of eighteenth-century Jewish Poland that no longer exists in any other form.

The narrating dead — Yente, an ancient woman who refuses to die throughout the novel’s span and observes everything from her unlocatable vantage point — is one of Tokarczuk’s most inspired inventions. She gives the novel a consciousness that is older than any event in it, a perspective that has seen enough iterations of human longing and human catastrophe to find Frank unsurprising without finding him uninteresting.

The National Book Award Translation

Jennifer Croft’s translation of The Books of Jacob won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2021 — a recognition that is as much about the translation’s quality as about the novel’s achievement. Croft, who also translated Flights, has spoken about the particular challenge of rendering a novel that moves between multiple historical registers of Polish, Jewish languages, and Latin. Her English is luminous: it manages to feel archaic without being inaccessible, historical without being quaint.

The novel sits at the apex of Tokarczuk’s career and is the work she herself has described as the most important she has written. It is also, frankly, the most demanding — not only in length but in the expectation it places on the reader’s knowledge. Some familiarity with the history of Polish Jewry, with the Sabbatean movement, and with eighteenth-century Central European politics helps enormously. The extensive glossary and notes are not optional apparatus.

The ideal way to read The Books of Jacob is slowly and with the glossary open, treating the novel less as a plot to be followed than as a world to be inhabited. Readers who have loved Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy will find the pace and density familiar. For those coming from Drive Your Plow, the shift in register is enormous — this is not an accessible entry point but a summit, and it rewards the full climb.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Tokarczuk’s greatest achievement and her most demanding: a nearly 1,000-page immersion in a forgotten chapter of European Jewish history, narrated with extraordinary ambition and translated with luminous skill.