![]() He asks Elisha Shoor, the rabbi in the family, to lend him books. He enters a general store owned by a Jewish family whose patriarch is a learned rabbi and there is confronted by the acrid smell of the increasingly popular beverage “cophee.” Passing through the store into the family’s quarters, he notices “thea,” a drink that helps Chmielowski sustain his scholarly efforts. The reader first encounters Chmielowski, an emblem of Enlightenment rationality and progress, on his way to the market in search of books. (We will meet Chmielowski’s foil, the charismatic Jewish messianic figure Jacob Frank, later.) The Rohatyn of Books of Jacob is a modest Polish town of two churches, a monastery, two synagogues, and five Orthodox churches, and is home to Father Benedykt Chmielowski, a priest with an insatiable desire for knowledge who has authored the first Polish encyclopedia. ![]() Rohatyn, like much of East Central Europe, has belonged to different countries over the last thousand years. ![]() Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, in a virtuosic translation by Jennifer Croft, begins in 1752 in Rohatyn, a rural town located in what is now Western Ukraine. ![]()
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