People of the Book

In December, I read a New Yorker article about the rescue of a centuries old, beautifully illuminated Haggadah from the Nazis during WWII. Known as the Sarajevo Haggadah (that's where it turned up in the late 1800's, and that's where it has been since then), specialists believe that it dates from the mid-1300's, with an origen in convivencia Spain, when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in relative harmony.

The author of the New Yorker article, Geraldine Brooks, has also written a fictionalized account of how the Haggadah came from Spain (to Catalonia to Venice to Vienna) to Sarajevo. Her novel centers around a rare book expert--Hanna Heath--who is commissioned to repair the Haggadah's damaged binding. During her work, she discovers clues in the manuscript that have long lingered there and give her brief glimpses of the travels of the book throughout its long life. Brooks intersperes Hanna's work on the Haggadah with the stories of the book in its other locales, linking the physical remants Hanna finds--a wine stain, an insect's wing, and others--to the individuals who were instrumental in making and preserving the Haggadah over time.

Brooks has taken a mysterious sacred manuscript and given it a whole life. Historically, very little is known about this Haggadah--the skeleton facts are that is was rescued from destruction 3 times: during the Inquisition in the 1500's, WWII, and then in the Bosnian war in the 1990's. Brooks has conjured up a whole centuries long life for this book, making its present day existence seem nothing short of miraculous. She makes the Haggadah the star of her novel.

This makes for a fascinating read. Embedded in her story are the rough outlines of the tortured history of the Jews; the idea of a book travelling with them, as a group of people, through one expulsion after another is compelling. I was particularly interested in span of time that the Haggadah was in Venice since we walked through the old Jewish ghetto on our recent trip there.

On a tangent, I think that somehow I got a brand new library copy of this book, with the binding tight, the pages crisp and clean, and the new book smell evident. When I see advertisements for Amazon's new electronic reading tool, the Kindle, I am uninterested. To me, one of the pleasures of reading is the tactile sense of holding a book in my hands, feeling its heft, turning the pages over one by one. It's not hard to see why a book about a book would captivate me.