People of the Book By Geraldine Brooks Viking, New York, 2008, $25.95, pp.384

The Born Again Haggadah

The protagonist of Geraldine Brooks's third novel, People of the Book, is the Sarajevo Haggadah. The author's recent article introduced readers of the New Yorker to the facts of this famous piece of Judaica's 600-year history. Articles have a way of turning into novels because authors yearn for the opportunities to re-imagine what is known and create events and characters out of whole cloth.

Hanna Heath, the chief of the novel's large cast of characters, tells her part of the story in the first person. She is a likable young Australian art conservator. A modern woman, she has her lovers and loves her work with a passion.

Hanna Heath meets the Haggadah in Sarajevo in the spring of 1996. The story shuttles between time and place: From 15th century Spain (where it is thought the Haggadah originated) to 17th century Venice to Imperial Vienna in the late nineteen hundreds, and finally home to modern day Sarajevo. The novel's strategy is ingenious. In her professional examination of the priceless pages of the illuminated Haggadah, Hanna comes upon a number of items: A grain of salt and a wine stain may not be surprising in an ancient book that had probably been used at many a Seder meal, but Geraldine Brooks invents characters and stories that explain these oddities—the piece of moth's wing, the secret of a short white hair and the puzzling presence, in the depiction of a family Seder, of a beautifully gowned black female.

There is a liability in creating characters at a great cultural remove from the reader. The best-researched detail may not persuade our imaginations that the African doctor's daughter, the Jewish converso acting as Vatican censor, and the unhappy emira in the harem are people pretty much like ourselves, and this is how, in their time and place and situation, we would have felt and acted. But these are good stories full of inventions and revelations that this reviewer will not give away except to say characters, like the woman in the illuminated seder, permit the pleasing speculation that the painter of these magnificent illuminations was a woman, sister in talent of the woman whom the Yale scholar, Harold Bloom, recently posited as the writer of the finest of the biblical narratives.

The real Haggadah was returned in 2002 (sorely testing our willing suspension of disbelief that it travels via Sidney, Australia) to be sneaked back into the Sarajevo National Library, which it had been famously sneaked out of in 1940. The beautiful central event of fact (and in Geraldine Brooks's fiction) is that the Muslim chief librarian spirited the precious Jewish artifact from its vault inside his shirt, under the nose of a German general who had come to either burn or, alternatively, save it for exhibition in the Jewish Museum which Hitler planned to create after the extermination of the Jewish people. In the novel, the Haggadah is hidden, for the duration of World War II on a shelf in a mosque in a small town near Sarajevo where the Germans were not going to look for it. The same librarian and his wife have their monument among the Righteous in Yad Vashem for hiding a Jewish schoolgirl in their home.

We shouldn't be surprised that the fictional Hanna plans on writing an article about the factual Haggadah. In the novel, Hanna throws light on the way her creator, Geraldine Brooks, writes to provide a "historical background…as seasoning between the discussion of technical issues…to build up a certain tension around the dramatic, terrible reversals…the Inquisition and the expulsion [of the Jews from Spain]. I wanted to convey," Hanna says, "fire and shipwreck and fear." The dramatization of fear in the novel does rather rely upon a familiar vocabulary—hands shake, knuckles whiten, breath is intaken. The fire, the shipwreck—the bird of prey feeding on a fleeing girl's father's corpse—create a sense of the horrific. Perhaps literary horror requires poetry. These inventions, nevertheless, look truths bravely in the eye and this reader found herself looking for excuses to not to have known the detailed ingenuities of inquisitorial torture.

The novel's inherent agenda is the truism that shocks us every time, anew: People burn books and rape, torture, murder each other. There is also the possibility of the conviviencia, a period in which Muslim, Christian and Jew cohabit their world, perhaps not in a Peaceable Kingdom, but for a season of neighborly "sun and shadow." It's true that such periods will be followed by burning, raping, torture and murder. And true, also, that there are always persons who think justly, feel compassionately and are capable of heroism.

There is finally a small act of bravery on the part of Geraldine Brooks in rejecting the old belief that the reader will be bored and will not stay around for the details of the professional life of a conservator. The discussion of technical issues turns out to be some of the novel's most interesting passages and good prose. Before there is art, thinks Hanna, there is chemistry. That the best conservation does not attempt to make a work of art as if new but receives what is and prevents further degradation would seem to contain a larger wisdom. Hanna's work of detection requires her to distinguish between the types of animal hides that made the pages of medieval books. It's fascinating to learn how gold and silver leaf is applied, about the grinding into usable powder of lapis lazuli. That the touch of love—that first feel of an old, rare, beautiful book is "between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby's head"—remains and grows in the reader's mind.

Lore Segal's most recent novel, Shakespeare's Kitchen, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.