The plot of “Yente,” your story in this week’s issue, revolves around a dying old woman, who is brought to a wedding party and kept alive, so as not to spoil the celebration, and who then, through her own craftiness, refuses to die. How did the idea for this character come to you?
I have asked myself this question so many times: Where do literary characters come from? What is the inspiration behind characters? But it’s not a question I can really answer. They definitely don’t emerge from a simple, rational, pragmatic set of decisions. At least, mine don’t. It’s more like a conglomeration of many different factors. Sometimes I piece together a character from various others I know. But more often characters appear spontaneously and almost fully formed, so, in that sense, I don’t exactly “create” them. And that was how it happened with Yente. She arrived ready. In a way, she was quite autonomous all along. It’s wonderful to work with a character like her, since she comes up with ideas for dialogues or scenes herself. She reminds me a bit of other women protagonists in my fiction, older women who still have so much to say and couldn’t care less about following the rules, which means that they transgress, do their own thing.
The story is adapted from your novel “The Books of Jacob,” which will be published in the U.S. next year. The book follows the eighteenth-century cult leader and self-proclaimed messiah Jacob Frank as he travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, acquiring disciples and detractors. Yente, in her suspended, not-living, not-dead state, hovers over much of the action. What role does she play in the book? Why is she there?
It’s hard for me to talk about Yente, one character in a novel like “The Books of Jacob” that’s made up of so many threads, as though she were extricable from every other thread. Yente does play a unique role in the book because she’s a strange and powerful narrator who—thanks to her exceptional state—can time-travel and has a panoptic view of the world presented in the book.
Her character helped me finish “The Books of Jacob.” She showed up when I was about a third of the way through the novel, just as I was becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of all the events, facts, figures, and problems I was trying to include, just as I was doubting that I could cope with such a complex, multivalent narrative. Yente gave the narrative a new perspective, a kind of bird’s-eye view, independent of time and space. Somewhat in jest, I’ve referred to Yente as a “fourth-person narrator,” a point of view that exceeds the competence of an ordinary third-person narrator so that it can see beyond the text and can even see the author of the text herself.
Yente is kept alive by a kind of spell or charm that her host, a younger relative, writes on a piece of paper and places in an amulet around her neck. Why does that slip of paper have the power that it has?
So much of Jewish culture is geared toward language, toward the word, the engine of the word and the depths of the word, its multiplicity of meanings and its openness to interpretation. At the same time, Kabbalistic tradition treats Hebrew words as the carriers of hidden signifiers that can be glimpsed through such techniques as gematria, temurah, or notarikon. This gives rise to fantastic, revelatory interpretations. Likely, many will glean in Yente’s story certain echoes of the story of the golem, that old Jewish legend from Prague. The golem was molded out of clay by an elderly rabbi, who brought his creation to life with a magic spell written on a piece of parchment. That spell was the word emet (אמת), which in Hebrew means “truth.” But erasing the first letter of the word produced met, or “death.” In this way, by erasing and rewriting that letter, the rabbi could start and stop the golem. There’s a similar idea behind Yente’s story, but in her case the incantatory word fuses with her physical body and pauses the process of her dying, although it doesn’t allow her to return to a normal life.
From a technical, narrative point of view, it was extremely useful to me to have a character in that state while I was writing the rest of the novel.
A lot of the story is, as you say, about the power of words and letters. Yente learned to read at a young age. Letters, written on paper, are what keeps her alive now. In the final moments of the story, we have words splitting in two, into “substance and essence.” Is that split, in a way, a parallel to death, which divides a person into body, or substance, and soul, or essence?
If you treat this event as a metaphor, then it does really demonstrate the great saving power of the word. It’s often noted in the novel that things that are left unsaid cease to exist. That was also my motive for writing the book: I felt sure that the lives of Jacob Frank and of the other people who played a role in that historical moment would eventually vanish into oblivion. It’s a moment in history that makes many people uncomfortable; it’s difficult to know what to do with it, how to think about it. Forgetting Jacob Frank’s story would have eliminated that discomfort. I have always been interested in the mechanisms of forgetting, and fascinated by how much of people’s lives and realities they fail to remember. Knowing that the word has the ability to create and, at the same time, to save something from nonexistence gives the writer real power. After all, isn’t it often the case that we remember scenes from a book or a film better than we do the things that happened in our actual lives? That we remember characters from novels better than we do real people?
I liked Jacob Frank’s story from the first time I heard it, and that’s why I dedicated several years of my life to retelling it. It’s extraordinarily spectacular, revolutionary, almost a picaresque. It involves a social revolution that predated the one in France—Jacob Frank’s followers emancipated themselves in remarkable ways over the course of just a couple of generations. I was also drawn to the idea of showing a different Poland—Poland as a great multicultural, multiethnic society in close contact with its neighbors on all sides.
We learn, through Yente’s journey backward in time, that she was the product of her mother’s rape by a group of Cossacks. She isn’t, as she has always believed, entirely Jewish. Is it partly that state of being not wholly one thing or another which allows her to remain suspended in this limbo between life and death?
I never thought of it that way, but you could read it like that, yes. To me, she is wholly one thing by virtue of her sensitivity, her delicacy. One of my intentions in writing this novel was to deconstruct received notions about origins, blood, inheritance. From a biological standpoint, an obsession with pure-bloodedness very rarely makes sense. Central Europe in particular was a gigantic melting pot, where genes, languages, and cultures all mixed together. Identities were shaped primarily by culture and religion, and, to a much lesser extent, biology.
You spent years doing research for the novel. In that time, did you come across any stories of people who had been kept alive in this way by spells or Kabbalistic rituals?
No, I’ve never really come across a story like this, which doesn’t mean that none exist. The subject of a being who remains on the border between life and death is present in many mythologies and in our collective imagination—in popular culture, too.
You might conclude from this conversation that “The Books of Jacob” is not a realist novel—that it’s a magical-realist novel, for instance. But that couldn’t be less true. Yente is the only magical, fairy-tale character in the book, since it is ultimately a historical novel that is based on true events.
As I wrote “The Books of Jacob,” I relied on facts as much as I could and insofar as I was able to access historical sources. In moments that struck me as risky, I simply paraphrased an original text from the archives so as not to make some sort of mistake. But the novel has rights of its own, and it demands a certain continuity of world, so it fills in the details, the fabric of everyday life. Only after that did I really use my imagination to think up stories like Yente’s.
The story is set two hundred and fifty years ago, in a Polish shtetl. How difficult was it for you to re-create the atmosphere and all the visceral details of those circumstances in that time period?
When I started working on this book, I knew very little about daily life in eighteenth-century Central Europe. It was difficult for me to re-create the world of small-town Jewish merchants, their traditions, their beliefs, their ways of thinking, of living—of everything. I had to create this world out of what I could learn from literature, from the archives, from incomplete stories. It was both a gargantuan undertaking and an enormous pleasure.
When you’re writing a novel, the most important thing is detail. It’s thanks to detail that you can create a world that will be imaginable to the reader, a world in which the reader will be able to feel at home. My work fell somewhere between the archeology of gluing together broken vessels and the building of a complex model ship, piece by piece. It often happened that I made a mistake and had to start over. For example, in a scene in which women were sewing by candlelight, I wrote a sentence about how the candlelight was reflected by the needles with which the women were sewing. Suddenly, I stopped, launched a thorough investigation, and found out that at that time no one in Podolia, where the scene took place, had ever heard of metal needles; instead, people used needles made of wood or bone—needles that wouldn’t have reflected any light. There were many things like that concerning food, clothes, means of transportation—a thousand different things.
As for the people, I was dealing with historical figures, about whom I knew only a few details that appeared in the source texts I tracked down—not what they were like, what they looked like, how they behaved. Those characters I had to carefully bring back to life. But I figured that, since only two hundred and fifty years separate the characters in “The Books of Jacob” from us today—not so many, when you think about it—they were fundamentally very similar to us in psychological terms, which meant that I could treat them as contemporaries. Historical novels always use the perspectives of the contemporary readers they’re written for, in any case.
Olga Tokarczuk’s responses were translated, from the Polish, by Jennifer Croft.
