Mission Impossible Discussion Prompts

October Discussion Prompts for monthly and every other month groups

PDF of October Discussion Prompts

“Preserves for Life”

1.  The story is written in the third person, but the reader is given almost exclusively the son's perspective on his life with his mother.  We mostly learn about her through him.  

• What does his perspective reveal about his attitude toward his mother before and after her death, and his attitude toward mothers in general?  Is there any evidence that the narrator is more than an insensitive, boorish parasite?
• How is his view of his mother when she was alive altered after her death?  What hints does the son find that suggest his view of his mother's life was incomplete, at best?  Is there any evidence that his mother was more than a long-suffering caregiver to, first, his Communist father and then, to him?
• What mysteries about his mother emerge?  

2.  Why do you think the mother was obsessed with making preserves and with writing beautiful labels?  

• What do you make of her more eccentric preserves--the sponge, the shoestrings, the "mushdooms"? 
• Why is the story titled "Preserves for Life"?  Why does the son think his mother left him a legacy of preserves?  For what or for whose life do we think the mother is preserving food (and other things)?  Is the title ironic?
• Why do the mother's oldest preserves date back to 1978, with a flurry of preserving activity in 1990/91?  

3.  Both the mother and the son long to be free.  

• From what does each want to free him/herself?  
• Why does each feel unable to free him/herself? 
• Does either achieve a measure of freedom?

4.  What is the prevailing tone of the narrative?

• Is this grim story ever funny?
• How do the descriptive passages (e.g. the repeated descriptions of the women who attend the funerals of both the mother and son, or the use of the words "partisans" and “fifth column” to describe the hidden stash of preserves) create tone and suggest meaning in this mysterious story?  

The Books of Jacob, Book 1--The Book of Fog

Aids to reading

Geography:

The novel takes place in towns and villages between present-day Germany and western Ukraine (from west to east) and between present-day Poland and Turkey (from north to south)—a territory considerably larger than Texas.  There is a very helpful map right before the Prologue that readers can use throughout the novel to orient themselves as characters traverse this territory by foot, wagon, and carriage.  "The Book of Fog" mostly takes place in Podolia, the eighteenth-century name for present-day western Ukraine--in Rohatyn, Firlejów, and Żytomierz.  Wallachia (part of present-day Romania) is also mentioned.

Characters:

The Books of Jacob has a huge cast of characters, some of whom are historical figures, some of whom reappear throughout the novel, and some of whom change names.  As we enter the world of the novel, it will be helpful to keep track of the following names:

Elisha Shorr—a Rabbi whose grandfather was a historical figure who published an important book about Jewish dietary laws and the proper ritual slaughter of animals

Yente—an old, dying relative of Elisha Shorr

Hayah—Shorr's daughter, who is a prophetess  

Father Benedykt Chmielowski—Dean of Rohatyn, a historical figure who wrote the first Polish encyclopedia

Katarzyna Kossakowska, née Potocka—the wife of the castellan (commander of a castle) of Kamieniec 

Elżbieta Drużbacka—as a historical figure, a Polish poet; in the novel, also a companion to Kossakowska 

Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk—the anti-Semitic assistant bishop of Kiev

Asher Rubin—a Jewish doctor who serves the entire population of Rohatyn: rich/poor, Jew/Gentile

Zelik, a Jew who escapes the bishop’s anti-Semitic persecution

1. Tokarczuk begins The Book of Jacob by meticulously creating the world her characters inhabit.

• The novel opens as Father Chmielowski travels to visit Rabbi Elisha Shorr on market day in Rohatyn. How do Tokarczuk’s descriptions of the trip, the market, and the people he encounters characterize the world in which she will locate her story?
• How do her descriptions of the wedding preparations for Elisha’s son bring to life the community of Jewish “true believers” in a small town in Podolia?
• How do the visits of Dr. Rubin to the Shorr house and then to the house of Kossakowska’s cousin, Łabęcki, the starosta or village leader of Rohatyn, portray the contrast between the cultures that live side-by-side in this small town?

2. Father Chmielowski, who has already published the first volumes of his encyclopedia New Athens, comes to Rabbi Shorr’s house seeking books and help to read Hebrew. He gives Shorr a treatise in which the seventeenth-century German polymath Athanasius Kircher “scientifically” critiques the building of the Tower of Babel. Chmielowski believes that Shorr has, in exchange, given him a copy of The Zohar (meaning “splendor” or “radiance”), a medieval text important in Jewish mystical thought. But, in fact, Shorr gave him a copy of Jacob’s Eye, a sixteenth-century collection of stories, folklore, and parables, whose purpose was to make the tradition of the Talmud accessible to children and everyday readers.

• By opening her novel with this meeting about books between a learned Catholic priest and a heretical Rabbi, what is Tokarczuk suggesting about the world of eighteen-century eastern Europe?
• What does the exchange of books between Father Chmielowski and Rabbi Shorr suggest about their attitudes toward each other?
• Does Tokarczuk’s title “The Book of Fog,” aside from describing the autumn climate, signify anything about the thinking of these two very different seekers?

3. The Books of Jacob is set during the Age of Enlightenment, primarily in the relatively peripheral regions of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, where “On the street, women in tattered rags gather dung and wood shavings for fuel. It would be hard to say, based on their rags, whether this is a Jewish poverty, or Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic. Poverty is nondenominational and has no national identity.” Against this backdrop of economic hardship and religious diversity, Tokarczuk introduces the reader to characters with very different views of knowledge, education, and proper action.

• In what does Father Chmielowski place his hopes for the future good of humankind? How do his beliefs and actions square with his vocation as a Catholic priest?
• What does Dr. Asher Rubin see as the true cause of sadness and suffering? How do his beliefs contrast to those of other Jews in the novel?
• In what ways do Rabbi Elisha Shorr’s beliefs and teachings reflect traditional Judaic thought? In what ways does his faith, as a “true believer,” deviate from tradition?

4. The female characters we meet in this first book have their own views of knowledge, education, and proper action.

• What kind of knowledge does Yente possess? Or Hayah?
• What important knowledge do female servants possess that is fundamental to caring for both female and male bodies?
• The poet Elżbieta Drużbacka boldly advises the learned Father Chmielowski to curb his excessive use of Latin in future volumes of New Athens. What does their exchange of letters suggest about the place of educated women among the upper classes of eighteenth-century Europe?
• How do the knowledge and perspectives of these varied female characters expand the reader’s understanding of this male-dominated world?

5. After opening her novel with scenes that vivify the people of diverse ethnicities, religions, and classes who engage with each other on market day in Rohatyn, Tokarczuk shocks the reader with the horrific account of the anti-Semitic bishop, who cancels his gambling debts by torturing and executing not only the man who loaned him money, but over thirty Jews of Zytomierz.

• What is “the blood libel” and how has it been used throughout history to persecute Jews?
• Why does Tokarczuk narrate the atrocities Bishop Sołtyk commits indirectly--through a self-justifying letter he writes to his superior, followed by the story of Zelik, whose father had lent the bishop the money to pay his debts? How do these two narratives differ in style and tone?
• What does the contrast between Bishop Sołtyk and Father Chmielowski suggest about the world of the novel?

6. In fact, throughout the novel, Tokarczuk will often tell her story through letters.

• What do the letters her characters write reveal about their character?
• How do letters advance the novel’s narrative?
• “The Republic of Letters . . . was the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment . . . These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical republic . . . The Republic of Letters relied heavily on handwritten letters for correspondence.”—Wikipedia
  • Do any of Tokarczuk’s characters see themselves as belonging to such a “Republic of Letters”?
  • Who is included and who, excluded from this “Republic”?