Rambling and Raving Reviews #1: People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Beware of how our books are treated.

“It was the cold hour, just before sunrise. I stared at the flames, thinking of blackening parchments in a medieval auto-da-fé; of youthful Nazi faces, lit by bonfires of burning books; of the shelled and gutted ruin, just a few blocks away, of Sarajevo’s library. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the oven, the mass graves.”

People of the Book is a story about saving a book. And about the choices people made, along the way, that put the book at risk, or that were its salvation. At a time in America when banning books seems to have become a national sport, at a time when some forms of language are being scrutinized and condemned, at a time when people are being targetted for who they or for where they are from, this 2008 novel deserves a read. Books and people are intertwined in this narrative, at a much deeper level than just in its title. Look at how books are treated, and you’ll see how people are treated. As the perfectly chosen epigraph puts it, “There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men” (Heinrich Heine).

Geraldine' Brooks’ historical fiction narrative is the fruit of research-intensive and extensive travel work. There’s a reason it comes with a map of Europe: the travels of the sacred text it follows are complex and often mysterious. The book in question is now known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish text usually read around Passover. “Haggadah,” in Hebrew, unsurprisingly, means to tell, to make known. And this is what Brooks builds her narrative upon: she tells this particular little book’s history, and makes it known by shedding light on the fictional actors that kept it alive through war and persecution all the way from its creation in the fifteenth century, when it was likely put together, to the twentieth, when it was lost and found one last time.

I love to find stories from the past where we can know something, but not everything; where there is enough of a historical record to have left us with an intriguing factual scaffolding, but where there are also enough unknowable voids in that record to allow room for imagination to work.

Geraldine Brooks, in an interview with BookBrowse

You can find images of the Sarajevo Haggadah and more about its history on the Zemaljski Mujez’s website here.

A scavenger hunt through time

“What’s that?”

“It’s the cuticle, you see. There are trace particles there, where you don’t see them in animals, of very stong dyes in the yellow specimen. You might see such particles in human hair - if a woman had colored or highlighted her hair, for example. But I’ve never seen it in an animal sample before. I think you’d agree with me that cats, in general, do not dye their hair.”

Brooks’ novel is a scavenger hunt through time. As Hannah gradually discovers the clues the haggadah begrudgingly yields, the story of the book is unveiled. In reverse chronological order, we read different threads of stories that, together, make up its history. A single yellow-tainted cat hair leads back to the original painter of the illustrations of the book, a fragment of a butterfly wing places the book in the Alps, a mysterious drop of blood is well camouflaged alongside wine stains. Hanna’s journey to uncover the haggadah’s journey through Europe brings her to consult all sorts of specialists, but she herself does not travel to all the locations her research reveals.

The reader, on the other hand, does. From Sarajevo to Venice to Spain, small narratives are threaded like beads throughout the narrative of Hannah’s research, each a fictional opening on to a crucial part of the book’s history. Chapters alternate between Hannah’s quest and historical stories based on Hannah’s findings. And through all these strands of time, patterns emerge, building up a network of metaphors and powerful scenes that hold the narrative and the book together.

A book of great love and tiny heartbreaks

One of the genius aspects of this book is how quickly we become attached to the myriad of characters peppered throughout. In just a few paragraphs, Brooks paints vivid and enticing scenes for her characters and brings them to life, revealing their flaws, dreams, and hopes in just a few subtle words. And these characters are always in the midst of a difficult life. Indeed, we are following the key moments of transit of the haggadah, the moments when they come and go from one set of hands to another, the moments when it starts or finishes its life in one location before being moved on to the next. The h draws all characters together in their misery. War, persecution, and delicate political and historical situations see our characters in flight or poised to run, flighting or fleeing.

One of the most poignant scenes of the book comes as early as the section of the book and involves secondary characters that we have encountered just a few pages prior. In this chapter, we follow Lola’s escape from Sarajevo after her family has been taken captive by the Nazis. She flees to the mountains with a group of rebels, a group that ends up dispersed. She ends up on the run with two of them, a brother and a sister, Isak and Ina. Ina is sick, and Isak is suffering from a bad case of frostbite on his foot, which ends up stalling him. Finally, it comes to the point where the two of them can’t continue.

He took the child, so thin now she weighed almost nothing. But instead of going on in the direction they’d been walking, he turned and hobbled back toward the river.

“Isak!”

He did not turn. Embracing his little sister, he stepped off the bank, onto the ice. He walked out into the center, where the ice was thin. His sister’s head lay on his shoulder. They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way.

This particular scene is devastating and so meaningful that there are echoes of it throughout the book. Ruth, at the very opposite end of the book’s narrative and all the way in Tarragona, also heads out into a body of water carrying a baby, and while the narrative leads us to believe, for a second, that she too is deciding the best path for her and her nephew is death, the scene ends up being a baptism. It is by tying together scenes like these two that Brooks achieves the coherence and cohesiveness of the narrative. Her characters are from radically different times and places and are as diverse as could be imagined, and yet they are held together, by the book they care for, yes, but also by various other commonalities, including narratorial parallels.

People in cooperation and in mistakes

People of the Book is really the book of people. People who, caught in politics they have nothing to do with, people who find themselves seemingly at the wrong place at the wrong time, all contribute to making the haggadah legendary. Through small, seemingly insignificant choices (or lack of choices—the book often is forgotten!), the legend of the book is forged. And it’s not glorious; it’s not beautiful nor unforgettable. It’s made of small stories and big choices; it’s made of ugly decisions, pettiness, and fits of rage. It’s made, in short, by humans.

He paged through the book, deciding there were too many errors. Vindictively, he cast it aside, destined for burning. That would show Judah Aryeh, the arrogant ass. Why not burn them all and be done with it? Then he could go home. He brought his arm across the desk, sweeping half a dozen unread volumes into the pile marked for the fire.

The book’s sacredness is somewhat emphasized, but more so is its artistic quality. It is its beauty and its historical value, not its sacredness, that ultimately save this book, as it passes from one hand to another, from the hand of a Muslim to that of a Jew, from a Christian back to a Muslim again. What is emphasized in each of these steps is the cooperation between people of different backgrounds and different faiths. And that this cooperation happens despite the political rifts and conflicts at play on the larger scene of history. Emphasizing, and oh, do we need that reminder right now, that individuals are perfectly capable of dialogue, of cooperation, and mutual aid. Emphasizing that faith and culture are nothing but an excuse for the conflicts of just a handful of egotistical, overly powerful men.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, the object of the book itself isn’t what matters. What matters are the individuals from all backgrounds and religions who fought to preserve the book. Because what they were fighting for, ultimately, was not the book itself, but humanity. Because so often, the book is not at the forefront of the characters’ minds. More often than not, it is themselves and not the book they are trying to save (although some of them take great risks explicitly for the book). The moment the book was most at risk of being lost was when one single man lost his faith in humanity and attempted to shield it from the world.

I highly encourage you to give this book a read, if you haven’t already. And if you have, I would love to know your thoughts!

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