Through History with Nechemia (EN/PL)
30.06.2024 - 14:00 / Festival Tent, ul. Józefa 36Jewish Culture Festival and Wydawnictwo Literackie publishing house would like to invite you to a meeting entitled “Through History with Nechemia” which will centre on Yakov Z. Mayer, the author of the book “Nechemia”.
From Komarno through Częstochowa and Kraków to Constantinople in the footsteps of Nechemia Kohen. Who was he? Has he left his mark behind? Why has the Israeli writer chosen him as the main character of his novel? The book “Nechemia” inspired by ta real man called Nechemia Kohen was published in Poland by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. The novel presents events preceding those described by Olga Tokarczuk in her monumental novel “The Books of Jacob”. The Nobel Prize winner herself wrote this about Mayer’s book: “Sometimes it seems to me that history may be recounted over and over again, depending on the perspective we adopt. This is also the case in this picaresque novel. We are presented with the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in one of the most dramatic moments of its history, seen through the eyes of an involuntary adventurer, cabalist and vagabond Nechemia, entangled in the story of the false Messiah from Smyrna. Great fun and a lot of non-obvious knowledge.”
More about the book:
A mischievous journey, full of invention, literary allusions and sharp sense of humour, into the inscrutable world of the Jewish soul.
Nechemia Kohen is a Torah scholar, a disbeliever, a fraudster and a sworn vagabond. With six fingers on his hand, an unbridled passion for books and a questionable moral backbone, having left his wife and daughters, he sets out to meet the Messiah who has just revealed himself and will soon fall: Shabbetaem Tzvi.
Together with the main character, we find ourselves in mid-17th century, one of the most turbulent periods in Jewish history. We learn about it from the point of view not of the main players, but of countless background characters: robbers, miraculous healers, wandering actors, Jewish, Muslim and Christian visionaries who accompany Nechemia on this adventurous odyssey – on foot, in wagons and rickety ships, through vast landscapes of Europe, monasteries, synagogues, marketplaces and crossroads, from tiny Komarno near Lwów to huge Constantinople.
