If there is one thing that moves Olga Tokarczuk (Sulechów, 1962), it is obsessions. For writing, for new stories, to bring out of the shadows what is unknown to many. The Nobel laureate in Literature acknowledges that this was the main impulse that led her to leave aside her work as a clinical psychologist to delve into literature. He realized that with words he could help his patients more than with science. A position that not only makes her feel more comfortable, but also allows her to mix the real with the unreal.
The obsession while writing Los libros de 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 Jewish transgressor who lived during the second half of the 18th century, who proclaimed himself the messiah, in a personal journey that took 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 bacchanalian rites.
This character, who traveled through two empires, that of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman, and who could well seem taken from a fiction, “I discovered him in a small bookstore in northern Poland. I wondered how his story had fallen into oblivion and disappeared from the collective imagination. I then considered writing 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”, confessed the Polish author at a press conference, who opens the Europe series at the CCCB today!
Approaching this book was “a very intimate experience” since “my family comes from the region where everything happens, for this reason I knew all the towns and rivers through which Jacob moves”. In addition, “I was interested in documenting the presence of Jews in Poland and different parts of Europe at that time, since I have the feeling that, when studying history, the idea of ??Jews stagnates in the Holocaust . No one seems to be wondering anything else.”
He proposed his lines from the start 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, Henryk Sienkiewicz, who also wrote to understand the history of Poland, but he did so in a nationalist, heroic, patriarchal and I would even say feudal way. With Los libros de Jacob I tried to counteract this perception and be a seed that proposes to explain the facts in a different way. This 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 people and peoples” and it took him time to look for “a new narrative that would allow me to explain everything in a different way. I don’t believe in national literatures. The content must be the same and go beyond localisms. The important thing is not, therefore, the language, but the images that we spread. Disseminating ideas is what is truly necessary.”
Stirring in 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 in both periods it has been present ” the problem of new people”, a term that refers to immigration. For this reason, he strives to “show the point of view of what has just arrived”.
He reflected on the continent and its community that “Europe is the best idea that has been invented in the last century and I hope that it will continue 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 a Europe of regions, not of nations”, he concluded.
