Geraldine Brooks took home a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for “March,” her retelling of “Little Women” from the father’s point of view. A Pulitzer, though prestigious, is not a comfortable laurel on which to rest. The subsequent novel needs to be darned good, or else the win looks like a fluke.
Brooks neatly hurdles this challenge with “People of the Book.” Using the Sarajevo Haggadah as a starting point, Brooks takes the reader on twin journeys, forward through the life of its conservator and back in time through the travels of the manuscript.
The haggadah is a religious text that tells the story of Exodus and contains the order of the Passover Seder. The Sarajevo Haggadah, no fictional invention, is a unique edition of this text. Originating in 15th-century Spain, it came to Sarajevo in 1894. Particularly unusual are its lavish illustrations, which come out of a time when the Jewish belief held that viewing such images constituted idolatry. The codex has twice faced destruction during the 20th century, by Nazis and by civil war. It was saved by the bravery of two of the National Museum’s chief librarians, both Muslims.
In Brooks’ story, in spring 1996 Australian Hannah Heath is pulled out of a sound sleep by the telephone. The Sarajevo Haggadah, missing since 1992, has been presented to the city’s Jewish community at the Passover Seder. The U.N. is funding the volume’s restoration, and Hannah, who isn’t the most credentialed, but is a politically acceptable choice, is asked to take on the project.
It is, for the 30-year-old, the job of a lifetime, particularly for someone who pursues her career with a focus that crosses into obsession. Prickly and determinedly emotionally unattached, Hannah says, “I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm.”
The chaos of Sarajevo, crawling with U.N. peacekeepers and scarred by the civil war, fades into the background when she first lays hands on the book: “As many times as I’ve worked on rare, beautiful things, that first touch is always a strange and powerful sensation. It’s a combination between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.”
Hannah’s job as conservator is to analyze the text, but not to restore it to its original state. “The way I see it,” she says, “my job is to make it stable enough to all safe handling and study, repairing only where absolutely necessary.” Once restored, the manuscript will be displayed in the National Museum, a symbol of the city’s multi-ethnic culture.
As Hannah examines the pages and removes the binding, she finds clues to the volume’s past. There are fragments of an insect wing and a white hair in the binding. There are channels in the cover, perhaps once made for clasps. Traces of saltwater and wine mark the parchment, perhaps remnants of its owners’ seders. Each offers a different clue to the past, of the book and of those who possessed it.
Hannah meets the first link to the history, Dr. Ozren Karaman, the museum’s chief librarian. Karaman braved a shelling attack to remove the codex from the museum’s safe, hiding it in a bank safe deposit box for the duration of the war. He lost his wife to sniper fire, and their infant son was badly wounded; he faces the recent past with more sorrow and cynicism than hatred. In taking Hannah past a mosque one evening as the two head to dinner, he remarks on the old men heading in to pray: “There they are,” he said. “The fierce Muslim terrorists of the Serb imagination.”
Romantic sparks begin to fly between the two, but it’s not a relationship fated to last. Hannah is too caught up in her many insecurities to allow herself the needed vulnerability.
Brooks alternates Hannah’s first-person narrative, which spans 1996 and 2002, with sections that grow from remnants of the Haggadah’s past. The fragment of an insect’s wing takes the reader to Sarajevo in 1940. Nazis are rounding up the city’s Jewish population for “work camps.” Lola, a teen, eludes capture and joins a mountain insurgent group, but ends up back in the city after Tito disbands the force. She is taken in and hidden by a Muslim family. The head of the family, Serif Kamal, is also the museum librarian who smuggles the Haggadah out under the Gestapo’s nose, and arranges a hiding place in a mountain mosque. It’s a story that parallels the experiences of Islamic scholar Dervis Korkut, whom Brooks credits in her afterword.
Each historical section reflects a unique time and culture: Vienna in 1894; Venice, under the pope’s inquisition in 1609; Tarragona during the Spanish inquisition, 1492; Seville, 1480, where the images were first created.
What joins each section, in addition to the Haggadah itself, is the richness of the historical experience. The demarcation between fact and fiction is invisible. And running through it all is an inescapable theme that reaches beyond the novel to resonate through current events: Religious tolerance can feed a vibrant and flourishing culture, but all it takes is a quick pendulum swing into intolerance to breed a world of hate and violence.
Brooks has created a unique niche for herself, mining small kernels of history to anchor her work. “Year of Wonders” was based on the 17th-century English village of Eyam, which quarantined itself to prevent the spread of plague. “March” grew from a fictional starting point but was set against a vibrant Civil War backdrop. This latest is more nuanced than its predecessors, and a much larger story, both in the ages it spans and in the pull of its characters.
All three works, though, share themes of bravery and human decency. And if the feeling at the end is one of redemption, it’s not a salvation that is confined to her characters. Brooks returns time and again to the idea that the actions of one can make a difference. And with her stories fueled by courage, empathy and conviction, the reader leaves the novel with a sense of hope in her fictional world, with a little left over for our own.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Fiction
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, $25.95
