Moment Magazine Book Club

Welcome to the Moment Magazine Book Club!

July/August 2008

People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks
Viking Press, 2008

People of the Book masterfully combines history and contemporary science with historical tales of 500 years of Jewish survival in Europe.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, a 15th-century book, tiny and richly illustrated, has had a miraculous journey. It has survived the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, the purging of heretical texts in Venice’s 1609 Inquisition, the Nazi book burnings and bombings during recent wars in Bosnia.
Entrusted with the Haggadah in 1996 Sarajevo, the novel’s heroine, Hanna Heath, painstakingly repairs the damage of time and accident. This prickly Australian rare book restorer retraces the steps that brought the book across time and space into her hands. Following tiny clues in its binding and in its construction, Hanna imagines her way backwards in time to discover the people who saved the Haggadah.

“The survival of the book was a symbol of the survival of Sarajevo’s multiethnic ideal,” a contemporary Sarajevo Jewish leader is quoted as saying at a seder. This theme is reflected in the novel’s Muslim, Catholic and Jewish fictional characters who appear in dramatically conceived historical circumstances: anti-Nazi resistance fighters freeze in the woods above Sarajevo, a Catholic priest cannot burn this beautiful text, a magnificent Muslim illustrates it with longing, and many others.

Chapters on the past and present alternate and in the contemporary ones, we get to know museum directors, book restorers, Hanna’s bitter mother and Hanna herself. An ingenious mystery unravels as Hanna defrosts her long-frozen heart and guides us through the arcane art of restoring ancient texts. The dismantling of the Haggadah leads to knowledge of survival and self.
— Susan Willens

Discussion Questions

What do you learn about the narrator—her age, her personality, her work—right from the start?
“The survival of the book was a symbol of the survival of Sarajevo’s multiethnic ideal” (p. 9). What else is symbolized by the book itself and its survival?
Like any good mystery, People of the Book is littered with clues. What does the reader learn about the white hair, insect’s wing, salt, wine stain and missing clasp?
What does Lola’s story in the chapter “An Insect’s Wing” dramatize about the 1940s? What happens to the Haggadah at this time?
Discuss the archivists and historians Hanna meets. What qualities does the author attribute to them?
In the chapter called “Feathers and a Rose,” Mittle’s illness determines the fate of the Haggadah’s clasps. Where else in the novel does human weakness protect this book?
What do you think of Hanna’s mother? Once you learn her whole story, does your opinion change about her?
In Venice, the rabbi Judah Aryeh takes terrible chances in disguise on the night of Carnivale. They are matched by the turmoil in the soul of the priest Giovanni Domenico Vistorini. What does this part of the novel—the chapter “Wine Stains”—add to its impact?
The chapter “A White Hair” is told in the first person by the homesick Muslim woman who illustrated the Haggadah more than 500 years ago. What is the effect of telling her story this way?
At the end of the novel, Hanna tries to escape to rigorous outdoors work back home in Australia. How does her emotional journey end? Is its resolution believable? satisfactory? How does the Haggadah finally find safety?

How To Run a Book Club
In this continuing feature about book clubs, we have touched on why to get people together to talk about books, when and at what intervals, and where to meet. In this issue, let’s think about the actual meeting—how do we keep the discussion focused and exciting? Next time we will decide how to choose the books.

Do We Need a Leader?
Every discussion group needs a leader. Really, every discussion group needs aleader. For a few minutes, a whole meeting, a season, or forever, every discussion group needs a leader.
Your group of readers gathers to talk about a book. Other topics—family,gossip, politics—lie in wait to distract you. If you want to spend the meeting on the book, someone has to be empowered to keep the conversation pointed in the right direction.

You may decide that you want to talk about the book for only part of the time, and move on to other things later. But together you have to clear that space for the conversation that brought you together around the room with the same book in your hands.

Who gets to lead?
Your group has many choices:

If you meet at someone’s home, the host or hostess can take the helm.
If one of your members is a natural leader—good at listening, commenting, calling on people, transmuting arguments into conversation, moving the conversation forward, knowing when to end it—then ask that person to be a permanent leader.
Have each member be in charge of one meeting, maybe because that membersuggested the book, lived in the country where it is set, or studied the topic it concerns.
Hire a professional, a teacher, librarian, writer, or someone else whom the group will pay to prepare for the sessions with research and questions. The group has to agree on the person, the fee and the nature of the job of group leader.

What does the group want from the Leader?
Mostly, whoever leads is like a midwife, bringing new ideas out of the conversation of the group’s members. The leader should have flexibility, sensitivity, imagination and respect for the opinions of all the members of the group. Think of the best discussion leader you ever had and imitate her or him.

The leader:

Guides the discussion without dominating it.
Keeps quiet and lets others think even if silence sometimes falls.
Listens actively, using the group’s comments to shape the conversation.
Supplies insights and information.
Keeps everyone involved.
Varies the action: Maybe someone reads aloud; small groups talk together for a few minutes; everyone one writes for a minute and reads to the others.
Has fun.

Good luck in your book group!
— Susan P. Willens

Read about the May-June selection, A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.

Read about the March-April selection, Bee Season by Myla Goldberg.

Read about the January-February selection, Night by Elie Wiesel.