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February 27, 2009
A miraculous journey
New book centres on the Sarajevo Haggadah.
PHYLLIS SIMON
This is the fifth in a monthly series co-ordinated by the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library and the Jewish Independent, featuring local community members reviewing books that they have recently read.
In People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel March, has crafted a story that is based in part on an historical premise: the mysterious origins of the beautiful Sarajevo Haggadah, a masterpiece dating from 14th-century Spain, and now housed in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Brooks' story, told through a series of flashbacks, is about the Haggadah's remarkable journey from Spain to Venice, Vienna and, finally, Sarajevo.
People of the Book started as an essay that Brooks first published in The New Yorker ("The Book of Exodus," Dec. 3, 2007). Presumably, the research she did for The New Yorker article served to fortify her novel, which was published in 2008.
In the essay, Brooks retold the story of the exquisite Haggadah, which is said to have left Spain during the Expulsion of 1492 and which then wandered through Europe, eventually resurfacing in the Ottoman Empire, where so many Jews had sought refuge. It finally landed in the Bosnian National Museum, where, during the Second World War, the chief librarian, a Muslim scholar named Dervis Korkut, managed to hide the Haggadah from the Nazis, who knew of its value and who sought to include it among their many thefts of Jewish property. (Korkut also hid a Jewish girl during the war; years later, her testimony served to honor his memory as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.)
The novel is told from the point of view of an Australian manuscript conservationist, the feisty Hanna Heath, whose careful examination of the book uncovers an insect's wing, a wine stain, salt crystals and a white hair, all foreign objects, which serve to unlock the dramatic and tragic history of the book. In alternating chapters, the reader is drawn back in time, first to the Second World War, among the partisans in Bosnia; then to late 19th-century Vienna, where the book's glorious binding is removed and replaced with cheap cardboard; followed by 15th-century Venice, where a priest miraculously saves it from the fires of the Inquisition; then to Tarragona, Spain, during the era of the Spanish Jewish persecution and expulsion; and, finally, to Seville in 1480, where the unusual illuminations in the book are created by an African slave girl.
This last scenario is Brooks' attempt to explain why there is an African woman included in the scene of the Passover seder in the Haggadah. Hanna's own trials and tribulations with her Bosnian lover (the main story is set in 1996, shortly after the siege has ended in Sarajevo, but still a very traumatic time) and her extremely abrasive mother (whose behavior toward her daughter is at first inexplicably harsh) act as counterpoints to her obsession with the book. She is determined to treat the Haggadah with respect and proper care and to ensure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Her story helps to link the very different episodes that give the reader a better understanding of the Haggadah and its remarkable survival.
The best moments in this novel come during the careful analysis of the manuscript and the author's ability to draw the reader into the mysteries and science of book conservation, as well as her retelling of the history of Jewish migration amid the book's own story of survival. The reader will be moved by these tragic events and is very likely to want, for example, to learn more about the forced conversions, torture and expulsion of the Spanish Jews, as well as the duplicitous role of Tito's partisans toward the Jewish partisans during the Second World War, stories that, although well documented, are probably not familiar to many people. These stories will haunt the reader long after the reading of People of the Book is done.
Phyllis Simon is co-owner of Kidsbooks (www.kidsbooks.ca).
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