So much of Jewish culture is geared toward language, toward the word, the engine of the word and the depths of the word, its multiplicity of meanings and its openness to interpretation. Yente does play a unique role in the book because she’s a strange and powerful narrator who-thanks to her exceptional state-can time-travel and has a panoptic view of the world presented in the book. It’s hard for me to talk about Yente, one character in a novel like “The Books of Jacob” that’s made up of so many threads, as though she were extricable from every other thread. What role does she play in the book? Why is she there? Yente, in her suspended, not-living, not-dead state, hovers over much of the action. The book follows the eighteenth-century cult leader and self-proclaimed messiah Jacob Frank as he travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, acquiring disciples and detractors. The story is adapted from your novel “ The Books of Jacob,” which will be published in the U.S. She reminds me a bit of other women protagonists in my fiction, older women who still have so much to say and couldn’t care less about following the rules, which means that they transgress, do their own thing. It’s wonderful to work with a character like her, since she comes up with ideas for dialogues or scenes herself. In a way, she was quite autonomous all along. But more often characters appear spontaneously and almost fully formed, so, in that sense, I don’t exactly “create” them. Sometimes I piece together a character from various others I know. It’s more like a conglomeration of many different factors. They definitely don’t emerge from a simple, rational, pragmatic set of decisions. I have asked myself this question so many times: Where do literary characters come from? What is the inspiration behind characters? But it’s not a question I can really answer. How did the idea for this character come to you? The plot of “ Yente,” your story in this week’s issue, revolves around a dying old woman, who is brought to a wedding party and kept alive, so as not to spoil the celebration, and who then, through her own craftiness, refuses to die.

The books of jacob tokarczuk