If there is something that moves Olga Tokarczuk (Sulechów, 1962) it is obsessions. For writing, for new stories, for bringing out of the shadows what is unknown to many. The Nobel Prize winner in Literature recognizes that this was the main impulse that led her to put aside her work as a clinical psychologist to delve into literature. She realized that with words she could help her patients more than with science. A position that not only makes you feel more comfortable but also allows you to mix the real with the unreal.
The stubbornness while writing The Books of Jacob, published in his country in 2014 and which has just been translated into Spanish by Anagrama, was none other than Jacob Frank, a young transgressive Jew who lived during the second half of the century. XVIII, who proclaimed himself Messiah, in a personal journey that led him from Judaism (in Poland) to embrace Islam (in Turkey) and some aspects of Christianity. A curriculum that led him to be persecuted and accused of being a heretic for questioning the established order and practicing orgiastic and bacchanal rites.
“I discovered this character, who traveled through two empires, that of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman, and who could very well seem like something out of fiction, “in a small bookstore in northern Poland. I wondered how his story had fallen into oblivion and disappeared from the collective imagination. I then planned to write a short essay but, when I started, I realized how little I knew and how much documentation I needed to do it. So I embarked on a project that completely obsessed me for eight years,” the Polish author, who opens the Europa cycle today at the CCCB, confessed in a press conference.
Tackling this book was “a very intimate experience” since “my family comes from the region where everything happens, so I knew all the towns and rivers that Jacob moves through.” Furthermore, “I was interested in recording the presence of Jews in Poland and different parts of Europe at that time, since it gives me the feeling that, when one studies history, the idea of Jews gets stuck in the Holocaust. Nobody seems to wonder anything more.”
He presented his lines from the first moment as “a pact with Polish literature. This was a book that I had to write for my compatriots, for my country, and because it changes the perception of our national history. We have another Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz, who also wrote to understand the history of Poland but did so in a nationalist, heroic, patriarchal and I would even say feudal way. With The Books of Jacob I intended to counteract this perception and be that seed that aims to explain the facts in another way. That was always my biggest motivation,” he confesses.
To fulfill this desire, he was very aware of the power of literature, “a powerful and sophisticated tool to communicate to people and peoples” and it took him time to search for “a new narrative that would allow me to tell everything in a different way. I don't believe in national literatures. The content has to be the same and go beyond localisms. The important thing is, therefore, not the language, but the images we spread. “Disseminating ideas is what is truly necessary.”
Searching the life of Jacob, the man willing to break taboos, made him see that “the situation in Europe two hundred years ago is quite similar to the one we live in,” since “the problem of new people” has been present in both periods. , a term used to refer to immigration. For this reason, he strives to “show the point of view of the one who has just arrived.”
Regarding the continent and its community, he reflected that “Europe is the best idea that has been invented in the last century and I hope it continues to exist despite all the problems we have.” She did not hesitate to remain critical of the far-right Polish government, which marks “a great distance” from the rest of the regions and which faces new elections in the coming weeks. “You can imagine the atmosphere right now. I am afraid because the situation is not clear at all. I believe in the Europe of regions, not nations,” she concluded.
