The death, wedding, and birth certificates I found in the municipal archive of Offenbach am Main enabled me to reconstruct the composition of the company that remained with Jacob Frank in exile until the very end, and also to more or less trace the fates of the Frankist families that returned to Poland.
That would be a worthy subject for another book.
The illustrations in this book come, in large part, from the collections of the Ossolineum Library in Warsaw.
The alternative numbering of the pages in this book is a nod to books written in Hebrew, as well as a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve gotten used to.
I feel certain that Father Chmielowski would derive great satisfaction from knowing that his idea of information available to all and at any moment would be realized some two hundred fifty years after his death. It is in fact thanks to the pansophy of the internet that I happened upon the trail of the “miracle” in the Korolówka Cave—the astonishing story of dozens of people’s survival of the Holocaust. This trail also led me to conclude, firstly, that so many things remain quietly connected, and secondly, that history is the unceasing attempt to understand what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.
Author’s Acknowledgments
This book could never have appeared in this form had it not been for the assistance of many. I wish to thank all those I have been tormenting for years now with stories of the Frankists and who, in pressing me for further explanation, rightly put forward questions that in turn helped me understand the complex and multilayered sense and significance of this story.
I thank my publisher for being patient; Waldemar Popek for his careful, thoughtful reading; Wojciech Adamski for locating a number of anachronisms and checking a whole host of small details, without which a novel always feels a little undercooked. Thank you to Henryka Salawa for the Benedictine editorial work, and to Alek Radomski for providing the original Polish edition of The Books of Jacob with its unusual graphic design.
I am especially grateful to Pawe? Maciejko for his valuable comments concerning Jewish history and in particular the doctrine of Jacob Frank.
Heartfelt thanks to Karol Maliszewski for being able to carry Nahman’s Prayer through time and space with poetry. To Kinga Dunin, for being my first reader, as usual.
I wish to thank Andrzej Link-Lenczowski for the in-depth historical consultation.
The illustrations in this book are thanks to access to the collections at Wroc?aw’s Ossolineum granted me by the library’s director, Adolf Juzwenko, while Dorota Sidorowicz-Mulak was the one who helped me get my bearings in that vast trove of materials. I am deeply grateful to them both.
After reading my first draft, my mom, who is a very inquisitive person, turned my attention to several little but essential facts relating to social customs, for which I am very grateful to her.
Above all, meanwhile, I thank Grzegorz for his talents as a detective on the trail; his ability to poke around in the least obvious sources yielded an incredible wealth of threads and ideas. And his patient and fortifying presence always gave me strength and permitted me to hope that I might one day see this book to its conclusion.