ABSTRACT
The Books of Jacob (Księgi Jakubowe), published in 2014, is Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece – a monumental epic novel, in which the writer re(de)constructs the multifaceted heritage of Jacob Frank (1726–1791), the Polish-Jewish non-orthodox religious leader living between the Kingdom of Poland, Ottoman Turkey and Habsburg Empire. Religious conversion, syncretism and heterodoxy, so characteristic of the Frankist movement, are artistically transformed by the Polish Nobel Prize winner. The unusual reference point in this chapter is Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) by the Serbian writer Milorad Pavić, a novel in the form of imagined lexicon of an Asian tribe that had also lived on the borderland of three monotheistic religions. Both analyzed novels have a strong connection to the most heated discussions in the contemporary Humanities and postcolonial studies. This article proves that approaching the issues of religious conversion and building of the new communal and spiritual identities in a multicultural environment are a point of convergence in the work of the Polish and Serbian writer.
