History Wrapped in Mystery

...The Sarajevo Haggadah is a kind of wandering Jew, and it is a survivor...

...This is a novel that simply never catches its breath, never rests...

...There is sudden death in “Saltwater” too, plus torture, illicit love affairs, rape, and so on...

...With respect to our own times, Hanna repeatedly voices her passionate support of multiethnicity in her typical feisty style...

...The Sarajevo Haggadah is the book at the center of Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel, People of the Book...

...its sale to the Sarajevo museum in 1894 by a family named Kohen...

...A number of historical facts are already established about the manuscript...

...and again, in 1992, its survival during the Serbian onslaught thanks to another Muslim, a librarian who hid it in a bank vault for the duration of the war...

...It is a story abounding in high drama bordering on the operatic almost every step of the way...

...There are, it is true, a few not so good Muslims in these pages—Bosnian Muslims who looted treasures along with the worst of the Ustashe Nazi collaborators during World War II, and iconoclastic Muslim zealots in pre-Inquisition Spain who defaced images of human beings in manuscript illuminations in fanatic compliance with the admonition against figurative art, which is proscribed in Islam as it is in Judaism...

...She is summoned to Sarajevo in 1996 to prepare the Haggadah for exhibition at the Bosnia National Museum in order to raise morale in the wake of the devastating war with Serbia...

...its escape in 1609 from book burning as a heretical text, attested by the dated signature of the censor, a Venetian priest...

...The solution to the mystery of the lost clasps, for example, involves infidelity, venereal disease and some bodice ripping...

...Right from the start she firmly makes clear her philosophy with respect to old books: She is emphatically a conservator, not a restorer...

...The “people” of the title encompass a diverse array of Muslims, Jews and Christians whose lives touched upon the turbulent history of the Sarajevo Haggadah over the course of nearly six centuries, “the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it...

...The intervening Hanna chapters (which unravel the mystery of Hanna to herself) operate at a fever pitch as well, including intense battles with her high-powered neurosurgeon mother, a traffic accident involving a fatality, shocking revelations about her paternity, a near fatal blow to her self-confidence, a bit of love, and a lot of deaths of people of all ages...

...A White Hair” similarly offers rape, enslavement, captive women, deaf-mutes, and much more...

...In the spirit of the greater leeway granted to Haggadot in general, that ideal may well be an acceptable contemporary spin on this venerable old masterwork and its tumultuous history...

...Unlike the other chapters, the solution to the mystery of the insect wing closely adheres to actual events...

...Taking samples of all of these findings, she brings them to experts for further examination...

...Given the inherently dramatic nature of the Holocaust, it is noteworthy that the chapter set during that period “An Insect’s Wing,” is the calmest, most evenly paced most measured of all...

...He and his wife, at great personal risk to their family, also gave refuge in their home to a Jewish woman, a former partisan fighter named Mira Papo (the fictional Lola), who years later, after many tribulations, submitted the names of the Korkuts for designation as “Righteous Gentiles” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and memorial in Jerusalem...

...In any case, the rules that apply to the most sacred books have always been more relaxed when it comes to the Haggadah even with respect to the text itself, which is essentially a patchwork culled from numerous sources over the generations...

...It has survived far worse...

...It has lustrous images illuminated in gold, silver and radiant colors drawn from lapis lazuli, malachite, saffron, and other gems and plants in the manner of the Christian and Persian manuscripts of its time...

...Moving back and forth from Hanna’s account in the present, spanning a six-year period (1996-2002), to the over five centuries of the Haggadah’s survival through the upheavals of Jewish history in the European Diaspora, Pe o p le of the Book is both a historical fiction and a series of mysteries...

...The reader, on the other hand, through interspersed flashback chapters, gets to know the full story in accordance with Brooks’ inventions and how the facts and clues are pieced together...

...Since the fundamental injunction of the Passover Seder is to recount the tale of the Israelites’ redemption from enslavement in Egypt for the sake of telling the children what their ancestors experienced (the word “haggadah” is derived from the Hebrew root for “to tell”), an exception might have been made for the Haggadah...

...In addition, she identifies markings indicating that there had once been silver clasps on the binding, probably of great beauty and value to match the work’s splendor and worth...

...Hanna is also intrigued—as have been so many others who have ever looked at the Sarajevo Haggadah or its facsimiles— by one of the illuminations depicting a prosperous family at the Seder table, for in the lower left-hand corner a small, black-skinned woman wearing a saffron-colored robe is holding a piece of matzoh...

...Korkut then arranged to have it hidden for the remainder of the War in a mosque in the mountains...

...As the Muslim librarian who saved the manuscript during the Serbian attacks, and who becomes Hanna’s lover, tells her, the Sarajevo Haggadah is “the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal...

...there is so much ground to cover, and the author hits as many of the predictable historical and local-color high points as possible, from al-Andalus to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust...

...But overall this is a novel with a strong message, and that message, put forward again and again, is the multiethnic ideal of tolerance and diversity...

...In the process of meticulously inspecting the Haggadah (throughout the novel, the reader is treated to a minicourse on the art of medieval manuscript illumination and conservation), Hanna finds three minute artifacts—an insect’s wing, salt crystals, and a white hair...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, “My Holocaust” THE STRICTURE against figurative art has long been a tenet of Judaism...

...its rescue from Nazi plunder by an Islamic scholar in 1941...

...The chapter called “Wine Stains” features alcoholism, gambling addiction, masked revelry on the Venetian canals, and sudden death...

...I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history...

...A lot of nostalgia is expressed for the era in Spain known as the Convivencia, when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in relative harmony...

...She notes, too, a russet-colored stain on one of the folios, possibly spilled wine...

...Those events have also been recounted by Brooks with journalistic polish in a recent New Yorkernonfiction article (“The Book of Exodus: A Double Rescue in Wartime Sarajevo," December 3, 2007...

...pictures would naturally serve to engage children...

...The good Muslims of multiethnic, cosmopolitan Sarajevo—where, we are reminded, the synagogue shares the public space between the mosque and the Orthodox Church—are intrinsic to People of the Book...

...For instance, she describes a colleague as “one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing...

...Brooks’ main character (apart from the Haggadah itself) is Hanna Heath, a spirited and strong-willed 30-year-old Australian manuscript conservator...

...FROM THESE DETAILS, some factual and some fictitious, the novel unfolds...

...So it is something of an anomaly that the Haggadah, the text used on Passover to organize the prescribed Seder ritual, is almost unique among Jewish books in that it is commonly illustrated—not only decoratively, but also with pictures of animals, and most strikingly with images of human beings...

...They include its likely origin in Spain sometime before the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492...

...Sometimes, if you were lucky, you got to release him for an instant or two, and he would reward you with a misty glimpse into the past...

...Thus there are such versions as “The Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb” (vegetarian), the “Dancing with Miriam Haggadah” (feminism) and “The Santa Cruz Haggadah” (“evolving consciousness...

...In less traditional circles, it continues to be massaged for contemporary relevance...

...To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history...

...It tells of a distinguished Islamic scholar and linguist, Dervis Korkut (his fictional counterpart is Serif Kamal), who in an incredibly daring act smuggled the Haggadah out of the museum while a German general, Johann Hans Fortner, was standing there demanding possession of it...

...Even toward the end when it appears that everything is settled a new mystery breaks out about the authenticity of the Haggadah on display in the museum...

...One of the oldest and finest illustrated Haggadot extant is the codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, most likely created in 15th-century Spain on sheepskin parchment by a master scribe...

...An Australian by birth now living in the U.S., Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel March and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covered the war in Bosnia...

...But oddly the sleuth herself can never really find out what happened, as Hanna disconsolately admits: “It was as if I was up against some genie who lived within the pages of old books...