Glossary

Affect

“The currency that connects our bodies and fuses us into communities is not a rationally elected choice, but a felt compulsion”

(D. Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania)

Community

“A group of people who share a story that is so important to them that it defines an aspect of who they are. Those people build the shared story archetypes (characters) of that community into their sense of themselves; they build the history of those communities into their own personal history; and they see the world through the lens of those shared stories”

(T. Lowe, Northumbria University)

Polyphony

“Polyphony literally means multiple voices. Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s work as containing many different voices, unmerged into a single perspective, and not subordinated to the voice of the author. Each of these voices has its own perspective, its own validity, and its own narrative weight within the novel”

(A. Robinson, Ceasefire)

Tenderness

“Tokarczuk’s ideas about narrative tenderness bridge the gap between trust and self-reflection, offering a fresh slant on the idea of the ‘hospitable reader’, the role of empathy, and a literary unus mundus where ‘human experience is united”

(A. Majak, Oxford Review of Books)

Sabbateanism

“A messianic movement of unprecedented duration and scope—was centered on the charismatic personality of Shabbetai Zevi, a seventeenth-century Jew from the Ottoman port-town of Smyrna who, even after his conversion to Islam in the summer of 1666—a discreditable act which was paradoxically explained in kabbalistic terms as the most challenging part of his mission—was believed by many to be the ultimate redeemer and an incarnate aspect of the kabbalistic godhead”

(A. Rapoport-Albert, The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women)

Zohar

“The most important work of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. It is a mystical commentary on the Torah (five books of Moses), written in medieval Aramaic and medieval Hebrew. It contains a mystical discussion of the nature of God, the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of souls, sin, redemption, good and evil, and related topics. The Zohar is not one book, but a group of books”

Frankism

“A Jewish religious movement centered on the leadership of Ya‘akov (Jakub) ben Yehudah Leib Frank (1726?–1791). The term Frankism was coined in early nineteenth-century Warsaw and was initially a slur directed at the descendants of Frank’s followers who converted to Roman Catholicism and attempted to conceal their background”

(P. Maciejko, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe)