People of the Book

My dear friend Clio posted a review of People of the Book late last year and I was curious enough to add it to my reading list.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the world's rarest books, a tiny volume noted for its beautiful illustrations of the Jewish Passover ritual. It is several centuries old and has somehow come to rest in Sarajevo where it has twice been saved from certain destruction, once during World War II and once during the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. So far, this is all true.

People of the Book is Geraldine Brooks's imaginative recreation of the haggadah's history: how and by whom it was saved during World War II; how and under what circumstances it was created, changed hands and came to Sarajevo; how it would have been received when that city was still part of the vast, Hapsburg-ruled Austro-Hungarian empire. Brooks uses the known facts to support her stories: that the book was created Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and that a Venice priest saved it from the flames of the Pope's Inquisition in 1609 before it finally turned up  in 1894 in Sarajevo. (Brooks helpfully explains her methods of building the story from these scant facts in a 2007 article from The New Yorker. Thanks, Clio, for originally pointing me to the link!)

While I was fascinated by this project, that is, the filling in of the historical blanks, I was less impressed with the final result. Too many characters in too little space for me to take even a surface-level interest in the fates of any of them. The main character is Hanna Heath an Australian rare books conservator whose discoveries - of a salt stain, a wine stain, an insect wing, and a white hair - lead to each historical interlude. Unfortunately, I found Hanna grating in the best of circumstances. My biggest gripe, as with Year of Wonders, is that the events at the end of the novel simply beggared belief. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of the stories Brooks had constructed, they were utterly believable, which is as much - or more - than could be asked of a project of this scope.

My sense is that readers who really like Geraldine Brooks would like this People of the Book. It's an interesting topic and Brooks comes to grips with her material very well.