This week I read Geraldine Brooks’ new novel People of the Book, an imagined history of a real book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated manuscript, which contains the traditional text that accompanies the Passover Seder.
The history of the book is largely unknown — it’s believed to have been made in Spain some time in the mid-14th century, during the Convivencia, when Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together in relative peace. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and nothing more is known of the book until the 1500’s, when notes in the margin indicate that it surfaced in Venice and was saved from the book burnings of the Inquisition. It made its way to Vienna and in 1894 it was sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo. However that didn’t assure its survival — during World War II it was smuggled out of the Museum by a Muslim scholar and during the Bosnian War of the 1990’s it was again saved by a Muslim and hidden inside a bank vault.
The plot of the book traces the fictional history of the Haggadah by traveling forwards and backwards in place and time. In the present day, Hanna Heath, an Australian book restorer, goes to Sarajevo to do restoration and conservation on the book before it is put on display. As part of her conservation efforts, she tries to ascertain more about the book’s history. In parallel, the reader learns about the book’s travels and owners as it journeys back in time across Europe.
I am amazed by the amount of research that Brooks must have done to write her book. There’s lots of information about bookbinding and conservation, as well as an incredible amount of historical detail. The adventures of the main, present-day narrator, Hanna, are awfully contrived, but the interspersed stories imagining the history of the Haggadah are much better. Certainly reading it was a fine way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon!