Jakubowski died not long after the Lord, surviving him by just a year. Yente’s omnipresent gaze sees an official adding his name to the Sterbe und Begraebnis Bücher of the city of Offenbach, under the date of October 19, 1792, giving as a reason for his death: “An einer Geschwulst”—in other words, an ulcer. Since no one truly knows how old Jakubowski was at his death, and since he seems to everyone to have been present since some mythical beginning, one of the young people simply says that he was very old. And so the official writes “aged ninety-five years,” a Methuselan age, worthy of one of the elders. In reality, Jakubowski was born in 1721, meaning he was seventy-one years old, but emaciated by illness, he looked more ancient than he really was. A month after his death, one of his daughters, Rozalia, also dies in Offenbach, bleeding to death in childbed.
J?drzej Yeruhim Dembowski collected his papers. In the end, there weren’t many—the whole could fit easily enough inside a single little trunk. The Life of His Holiness Sabbatai Tzvi, which Jakubowski worked on throughout his life, losing himself in Kabbalistic digressions, turned out to be just a thick stack of papers filled with diagrams, drawings, geometric calculations, and strange maps.
A year after him, Jan Wo?owski, called the Cossack, also passed away, and not too much later Joseph Piotrowski, also known as Moshko Kotlarz—Kotlarz meaning “the Tinker” in Polish—who had been sent to Offenbach for a peaceful respite in his old age; though childish and recalcitrant, he was well-cared for there.
In September of 1795, Mateusz Matuszewski died, and less than a month later, so did his wife, Wittel, known as Anna. After her husband’s death, she became oddly insensate to the world, and she never really recovered. It sometimes happens that spouses cannot live without each other and prefer simply to die, one after the next.
The two Szymanowski brothers, Elias and Jacob, also died one after the other, both in old age, after which the rest of the Szymanowski family went back to Warsaw.
With the demise of Jakubowski’s brother Pawe? Paw?owski, formerly Hayim of Busk, who was the last of the elders at Offenbach, the court slowly emptied, and although a number of true believers, predominately from Moravia and Germany, still lived in the city, they were less and less connected with the court. When after a long and exhausting illness, Eva Frank’s younger brother Joseph died in 1807, Eva, who had dedicated herself to taking care of him, managed to escape from under her creditors’ watch, fleeing to Venice, but she was brought back by news of Roch’s illness. Roch Frank passed away on November 15, 1813, alone, in his room; they had to break down his door in order to carry out and subsequently bury the unfortunate man’s large, alcohol-swollen body.
Eva Frank saves Offenbach from Napoleonic looting
They had tried to powder up Roch a little when he was already very ill in March of 1813, as Eva Frank was to receive a visit to her home on the corner of Canalstrasse and Judengasse from Tsar Alexander. News of this visit was supposed to be confidential, but it quickly spread around town. The tsar wished to acquaint himself with this famous Jewish-Christian colony, about which he had had ample opportunity to hear during his travels around Europe. As an enlightened and progressive ruler, he had long intended to found, on the territory of his vast nation state, a small country where Jews could live in peace and maintain all of their traditions.
The tsar’s visit fueled rumors that had been circulating around Offenbach for years, that Eva Frank’s intimate ties with the Russian throne were permitting her to postpone paying off a number of debts. The tsar liked what he saw so much that a few years later he appointed, by imperial decree, a Committee for the Protection of the Israelite Christian colonies that were to be started in Crimea. The primary task of this committee was the conversion of Jews to Christianity.
Eva and Roch had become heroes in Offenbach back in July of 1800, when Roch was still in relatively good health, as wartime upheaval made its way to the town, which until then had been quite peaceful.
The left wing of the French army, which included the Polish Danube Legion fighting under General Kniaziewicz, captured an Austrian cannon, and that very same night, they occupied Offenbach. In a frenzy to loot and plunder, the soldiers descended upon the innocent city, and it was only the decisiveness of Eva and her brother that saved Offenbach. Evincing magnanimity and perfect hospitality, they threw open the doors of their home to their countrymen, receiving them with extravagance, without regard for their own safety, nor for the enormous expense, and in this way, through their generosity and kind words, they were able to quench the lust of the troops. For this Eva would be remembered fondly by the inhabitants of Offenbach. Its women’s virtue, its shop windows, the goods held in its storehouses—all came unscathed through a war that had devastated neighboring towns. And Eva, who was already heavily in debt, managed to obtain further loans.
Sadly, she spent her final years under house arrest with her lady-inwaiting, Paulina Paw?owska, and her secretary, Zaleski, who was responsible for their provisions. After her death, on September 17, 1816, their home was officially sealed off, yet her disappointed creditors found nothing of value inside it, aside from a couple of the baroness’s personal belongings, which were more like souvenirs. The only thing they were able to get any real money for, in fact, was the fantastic dollhouse, with its four stories and many rooms, living rooms, and bathrooms, furnished with crystal chandeliers, silver services, the finest wardrobe. Each of the little house’s appointments was auctioned off separately, amounting to a sizable sum. It all went to a banker in Frankfurt.
Paulina Paw?owska married a local councillor, and for a good while she entertained his social circle with her strange stories of Miss Eva’s various connections, of the court at Vienna, of the wonderful goat with the flexible horns that inspired a certain local artist to place a sculpture depicting it over the entrance to one of the town houses of Offenbach.
Meanwhile, Franciszek Wiktor Zaleski, known as Der Grüne—as he, like his dearly departed wife, always dressed in green—lived happily at Offenbach until the mid-nineteenth century. He had ordered his arteries cut after his death, being terribly afraid of being suspended in a deathlike lethargy.
The skull
All the Offenbach neophytes were buried in the city cemetery, though some years later this cemetery began to interfere with plans to expand the town, and it was ultimately liquidated in 1866. The bones of those buried there were carefully collected and respectfully reburied elsewhere. Jacob Frank’s skull was removed from his grave, and, thoughtfully recorded as “a skull belonging to a Jewish patriarch,” it passed into the hands of the historian of the city of Offenbach. Many years later, under unknown circumstances, it made its way to Berlin, where it underwent detailed measurement and research and was labeled a prime example of Jewish racial inferiority. After the Second World War, it vanished without a trace—either it was destroyed in the turmoil and chaos of war, crumbling to dust, or else it is still lying around somewhere in the underground storage facility of some museum.
Of a meeting in Vienna