Jacob, meanwhile, occupies his own picaresque novella. Tokarczuk writes in the first person, the third person and the “fourth person” - another of her coinages - which means, more or less, a quasi-omniscient hovering spirit: In this case, this narrator is Frank’s grandmother Yente, whose body lies suspended between life and death while her spirit watches from on high. “The Books of Jacob” is another of what Tokarczuk calls her “constellation novels.” She passes the narrative baton from character to character in a thrilling relay of perspectives, and avails herself of diaries, letters, poetry, prophecies, and parables, as well as traditional narrative, as they suit her needs. Tokarczuk, who has read Scholem closely, agrees, although her epic tells the tales not just of Frank’s followers, but of his Jewish enemies, Catholic abettors and the many others whose lives he upended. “Even more than the psychology of the leader, it is the psychology of the led that demands to be understood,” wrote Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish messianism. Like Jesus, Frank stands at the center of Tokarczuk’s scripture, its object rather than its subject.

Tokarczuk sticks close to the historical record, but fills its gaps with made-up characters and charges the atmosphere with the daemonic energy of Jewish folk magic and a sense that God lurks nearby. One way to think of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus, “The Books of Jacob,” is as the fictional gospels of this apparently mesmerizing and highly problematic cult leader. In 1759, Frank led thousands of his followers into Polish Catholic churches to be voluntarily baptized, a mass conversion that stunned the Jewish world. He pushed its heresies so far they arrived at Christianity, complete with a Trinitarian God and a cult of the Cross. Nearly a century later, Sabbatianism gave rise to another messiah. His apostasy did not prevent the spread throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire of - well, let’s call it his sect, though in some ways Sabbatianism was a new religion. In 1666, Sabbatai Zvi, the most notorious self-proclaimed messiah in modern Jewish history, was tried for sedition by the Ottoman sultan and given a choice: Islam or death. THE BOOKS OF JACOB By Olga Tokarczuk Translated by Jennifer Croft

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