Marian – who has been saved from the Ghetto by a Polish family, according to his biological mother’s last will, steps his way into a seminary, only later to take up a job at a small parish. When it comes to religion, Marian is extremely serious, and when observing sinful habits of the provincial church, he feels both disgusted, and terrified.
Because of this, he escapes to the Catholic University in Lublin, where he takes up philosophy studies. He pursues with his PhD while spending time on a scholarship in Paris, however he is forced to come back (to his country) due to unfair suspicions of breaking up the laws of celibacy. At home, his mother reveals the s long hidden truth about the priest’s Jewish origins. Shaken, the man tries to find his biological family with the help of befriended nuns. At the same time he is struggling to find his way through the perplexed depth of his complex identity, this time considering Catholic faith, Judaism, Polishness and Jewishness – the family who raised him, and the one that war took away from him.
He decides to take up a different name – Jacob – in honor of his father whom he never got to know, and soon later departs to Israel, to meet his Jewish relatives. In an act being not as much as a provocation, but rather a sincere, idealistic try to decompartmentalize, Marian and Jacob start wearing a clerical collar, and skullcap, both at the same time.
It is not welcome by the rector, neither by the Jewish community where they live now – members of diaspora trying to get in touch with the faith of the descendants.
Jacob cannot find a place for himself in kibbutz, or the Jewish community for Jesus, and finally ends up in Yad Vashem Archives – a trip that he himself declares might happen to be just “a nice walk”.
Tadeusz Słobodzianek dedicated The story of Jacob to Romuald Weksler-Waszkiel, whose tragic life takes the spectators galloping through the fact-based, complicated story of a Jewish priest. Glimpses of conversations, most important events, dithers and conflicts, let Słobodzianek not only encapture as much information as possible, but also, in an extremely nuanced way, present the complex issue of Polish-Jewish relations, history and identity. It is complicated by religious matters, institutional ones (Catholic church), and political ones (communistic authorities and constant sniffing around the characters’s lives by the secret securities).
Seeing these wrecking powers, and despite disappointments: one after another, Jacob maintains uncompromising attitude when it comes to faith and morality – confronting also his ambivalent identity. Around Jacob, as well as within him, there gather and collide the most important Polish - Jewish strands, a spam of twenty-hundred-year history.
Meanwhile, the hero walks the path of this labyrinth of more and more absurd life – following his own unfailing path:
“I know who I am -
a human,
Who will unite
That all -
That being my story”