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Olga TokarczukA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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From her elevated position, Yente understands “the workings of the messianic machine” (314). She knows that the Messiah must endure great suffering to change the world. A badly-beaten and bruised Jacob is escorted to a monastery by a group of soldiers. He has been sentenced to “internment” (311) in the monastery, where he is examined by the monastery’s recently appointed prior, Ksawery Rotter.
Jacob is placed in a chamber; he is accompanied by his valet and cook, Kazimierz, who exchanges tobacco for supplies. Once a week, Jacob is permitted to walk along the monastery ramparts and all the inhabitants gather to stare at the “Jewish prophet” (308). He observes the devoted visitors to the monastery who flagellate themselves with whips. Jacob is allowed to mingle in the crowd of penitent believers. Later, he explains his experience to Kazimierz and insists that the Messiah and salvation will arrive via a Virgin and “that Virgin has been dedicated to [him] alone” (303).
Hana receives a letter from Jacob, written in Polish. Nahman translates it for her, and soon the news has spread throughout the community of Contra-Talmudists: Jacob is alive. Shlomo goes to the monastery to visit Jacob and meets Kazimierz outside, who complains about Jacob’s erratic behavior and the unfairness of his own imprisonment. He tells Shlomo about a sympathetic guard named Roch, who is bribed to allow him to have a brief audience with Jacob through a small window. Shlomo blames Nahman for betraying Jacob and asks to be made Jacob’s deputy. A few days after Shlomo’s departure, a “chest of things” (296) is delivered to Jacob. Hesitantly, the prior allows the prisoner to have the expensive writing implements, books, and food contained within. Jacob studies the Polish language, using Father Chmielowski’s New Athens. He also attends mass. Near Christmas, Jacob receives visitors and gifts.
Druzbacka writes to Father Chmielowski about the recent death of her daughter. Her grief is causing her to suffer from a crisis of faith. The monastery where she prays is the same as that where Jacob is imprisoned. She asks him whether he is capable of “bringing the dead back to life” (288).
Yente’s great-granddaughter Pesel gets married, still worried whether she and her family did the right thing by placing Yente in the cave. Yente herself knows that the dead are not confined to their graves; she can see ghosts wandering the earth but—since she is not actually dead—she cannot join them. Jacob receives letters; he is still angry with Nahman and has refused to meet with him. Angrily, he reads Nahman’s description of what Jacob’s followers have done in his absence. He insists that Jacob needed to be imprisoned “so that all the prophecies could be fulfilled” (281).
Hana and her children continue to live with Katarzyna Kossakowska but Hana is “afraid to leave the house” (276) due to a wave of violence directed at Jacob’s followers by the local Jewish people. The sudden death of Katarzyna’s husband has left her feeling helpless and she resents the ways in which the Contra-Talmudists continue to ask her for help. The “solution” (275) involves torturing local Jews and forcing them to admit that they killed a baby to use its blood in a ritual. A trial is held, and the convicts are baptized, then executed. The Jews are then driven out of town. Before leaving, a rabbi curses the entire town and its inhabitants.
In the following months, a plague strikes the children of the Contra-Talmudists. Remembering Hayah’s skills as a prophet, the desperate inhabitants write to her for guidance. To her own surprise, Hayah foresees that the King of Poland will die and that “the new king will be the last king of Poland” (271) while Jacob will be freed by his own enemies, allowing him to escape south. He will live in a castle beside a river.
Sometime later, the king dies. Jacob writes to important people and asks to be released. Katarzyna Kossakowska is restless and hopes that her favored choice will be the new king. Bishop Soltyk continues to struggle with his gambling debts. Pinkas continues to work for Rabbi Rapaport with devotion. He translates an official proclamation by the Catholic Church which insists that the antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jewish people and “the letting of Christian blood” (267) is utterly without foundation. Pinkas is horrified to discover that his nephew has become one of Jacob’s followers and has been baptized. Katarzyna Kossakowska arranges for Hana to be with Jacob, and she is annoyed about the messy state in which Hana and her retinue leave the house.
A month after Hana’s reunion with Jacob, she is pregnant again. Jacob’s long confinement has badly affected his health. Hana is permitted to meet her husband once a day and, with the rules of the monastery relaxed, he is able to surround himself with a retinue of women. Jacob tells the women to select one from amongst them to be impregnated by him. He becomes angry when they cannot choose and insists that his followers divorce and find new partners. Reluctantly, they obey him. As more of his followers move to the area to be near Jacob, he even forgives Nahman.
Wajgele hides effigies of her dead children and confesses her fear to her husband, Nahman. During one of his sermons, Jacob speaks about the interconnectedness and the mystical importance of cave systems. Wajgele becomes pregnant again. Under the rule of the new king, the monastery where Jacob is interned is placed in control of a rotating selection of priors. Hana’s father, Tovah, and her brother, Hayim, visit the monastery and their presence invigorates her spirits. Tovah listens to the outlandish ideas Jacob has conjured during his five years of confinement. Jacob speaks fervently about how the Virgin is imprisoned in one of the monastery’s paintings. Tovah notes the suffering of Jacob’s followers, which they are blinded to by their devotion and belief. He wants to get Hana and his grandchildren “far away” (252) from Jacob and his anger forces him to confront Jacob. However, he fails and then leaves. Hayim stays behind with Hana. Tovah plots how he will “take a stand against Jacob” (250).
Sensing that his situation in Poland is becoming untenable, Jacob sends Nahman to Moscow to discover whether he and his followers might be able to set up new lives in Russia. Before the delegation’s departure, Jacob tells Nahman and the others to have sex with Hana to bind them to him as brothers.
Druzbacka writes a final time to Father Chmielowski. However, Chmielowski never reads the letter because he dies a short time later. Moliwda is recruited into the government bureaucracy by his older brother, a retired military man. He writes and translates letters for the diplomatic services. Following the coronation of the new king, a war is brewing in Poland. Russia is threatening to invade.
At the monastery, Jacob begins to explore the local cave systems. He believes that all the caves are connected and that “deep inside, at the very bottom, is the grave of Adam and Eve” (240). Nahman’s efforts in Russia end in miserable failure. His delegation returns to the monastery where Jacob punishes them by forcing them to publicly beg for forgiveness. Jacob tells his followers to come to the monastery to be baptized en masse. A religious uprising launches a war in Russia, accusing the king of colluding with Russia. Many Jewish refugees come to the monastery, curious as to whether Jacob may actually be the Messiah. Russian armies invade Poland. Jacob summons his eldest daughter, Avacha, to the monastery. She has grown into a beautiful woman, so he orders her to stay in her chambers at all times to avoid male attention.
Russian troops lay siege to the monastery, which is taken over by soldiers from the religious order. The soldiers take away many of Jacob’s freedoms. Hana dies and is buried in a cave; her death shocks Nahman, who had believed Jacob’s proclamation that his followers would not die. With the siege lasting several years, Nahman writes in his books that Avacha is raped and then sent to Warsaw. Jacob becomes ill and his body seems to wither away. The soldiers defending the monastery eventually surrender and the Russian troops take over, setting great fires and drinking all the alcohol. Their leader, General Bibikov, grants Jacob “official permission to leave the monastery” (229). Jacob and his followers adopt new identities and leave Poland.
In the wake of the persecution of the Contra-Talmudists, Nahman searches for a way to justify himself. Nahman is the opposite of an objective thinker. He is clearly an intelligent man, but he cannot look beyond his enduring faith in Jacob as the Messiah. He feels guilty that his testimony was used to send Jacob into confinement, but he hits upon a justification buried in one of Jacob’s teachings: He remembers how Jacob talked about the Messiah’s need to suffer. By telling himself that Jacob’s imprisonment is an essential part of the prophecy, Nahman is not only able to excuse his betrayal of Jacob, but also place himself right in the center of the story of Jacob’s ascent to Messianic status, making himself a necessary part of history. His refusal to abandon his beliefs is so strong that he would rather congratulate himself on bringing about his friend’s imprisonment than doubt Jacob’s claims for even a second.
Throughout the novel, Nahman marries several times. He has several children, some of whom die young. Despite his ability to father a family several times over, Nahman is barely interested in family life. Furthermore, he seems completely disinterested in sex. Nahman has sex with his wives as a duty. He is told to marry a woman and raise children, so he does so. In reality, he is more devoted to Jacob and to his writing than any woman or child. Nahman’s devotion to Jacob hints at sexual undertones in Jacob’s relationships with many of the male characters, which are never quite realized. Both Nahman and Moliwda look at Jacob with a sense of longing. While Moliwda distracts himself with sex, Nahman moves in the opposite direction. He views sex with his wife as a demonstration of his love for Jacob. In a sense, his marriage is a vicarious expression of his love for another man.
The death of the King of Poland is a pivotal moment in the narrative. Not only is it the catalyst for the outbreak of war and a Russian invasion, it demonstrates Jacob’s comparative lack of agency when sketched in historic terms. Jacob languishes in the prison for 13 years. He makes friends with the people in the monastery and tries to turn the situation to his advantage, yet there can be no doubt that he is very much a prisoner. He tries everything he can, from feigning devoutness to letter-writing to subterfuge and bribery, but he cannot bring about his release. Jacob claims to be the Messiah but he cannot even save himself from a monastic cell, yet alone save the souls of his followers. The death of the king is a passive moment in Jacob’s life. He has no control over this, nor over the other events which ensue, though they are vital in bringing about his freedom. Jacob’s release is a passive event in a life defined by failed attempts at self-assertion: For all his attempts to exercise his agency over the world, Jacob cannot even assert his agency over his immediate situation.
By Olga Tokarczuk
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