Everybody Reads: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob
We invite you to read Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece, now translated for the first time into English, and listen to a worldwide discussion of the book guided by our distinguished panelists.
Poland’s literary star Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. This winter her most ambitious novel The Books of Jacob was translated into English, having first appeared in Polish in 2014. This sprawling epic tells the story of Jacob Frank, a real-life messianic figure in eighteenth-century Poland, who led thousands of his Jewish followers into Catholic baptism. The book weaves together the lives of Poles and Jews, women and men, peasants and nobility, priests and rabbis, rulers and visionaries, in an unsettling tapestry of earthy beauty and poignancy. The landscape and history of Ukraine feature vividly in this brilliant narrative.
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Enjoying the debate thanks, and looking forward to reading Tokarczuk in the near future.
Curiously absent from this discussion is any mention of Pawel Maciejko's book "The Mixed Multitude," which is, to the best of my knowledge, the best and most comprehensive history of Jacob Frank and Frankism. Tokarczuk hews very, very closely to Maciejko's narrative and doesn't stray at all from his chronology. But a superb discussion nonetheless, and I'm grateful to PSU and to each of the presenters for their extremely enjoyable and useful commentary. Great video. Thanks for presenting it.
@jimpalmer2981
5 ай бұрын
@@ericjackson-nq4hp Well, I didn't say it was the only one. I will say, however, that aside from Scholem's studies and Arthur Mandel's "The Militant Messiah," which is problematic for a lot of reasons, Maciejko's book is the most concise and most thorough study on Frank and Frankism that I've seen, and anyone who's read both books can very easily see the connection. I was just surprised not to have seen mention of it in this video. I wouldn't read too much more into the comment.
The 1990s was a terrible time for many people in Poland. The economic transformation hit hard and they lost stability and felt an awful lot of fear. The unemployment rate skyrocketed, foreign businesses bought and strippped many factories, and organised crime started to form, from the internal militia who were now laid off. I can imagine it was far from paradise. Thankfully it's much better now.
@cola3173
10 ай бұрын
Poland was chaotic in the 90s, but today the excesses of capitalism (the right to beat others in the marketplace) are slipping, as usual, into the excesses of old fascism (the right to dominate others, especially women, immigrants seeking a better life, and the systematically impoverished and immiserated). The return of old symbolizations and archaic legal orders, all in the name of maximizing domestic GDP, is sickening. Human life is treated as secondary, as a waste product. Only an egalitarian social order--ie. a new type of communism, a 3rd, internationalist epoch after the failure of state socialism--will save Poland from future war and misery
@A_Million_Air
27 күн бұрын
@cola3173 are you Polish?