People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book (2008) is a historical fiction novel about a book conservator named Dr. Hanna Heath and her intensive research on the history of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. The book is an imagined history following the real clues found in the manuscript, and the novel jumps back and forth between Hanna’s findings and historical events that brought the book to its current home in the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Brooks is an acclaimed writer in the genre of historical fiction; her works include Year of Wonders (2001), The Secret Chord (2015), and March (2005), which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1994), a bestselling work of nonfiction.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature instances and discussions of antisemitism, war, and rape.

Plot Summary

The book opens with Hanna in a bank in Sarajevo. She is introduced to Ozren Karaman, the kustos and chief librarian of the National Museum, who saved the precious Sarajevo Haggadah from a bombing during the war in the early 1990s. Hanna inspects the book and finds a white hair, salt, wine stains, and the wing of an unknown insect. She then begins an affair with Ozren, and she learns about the traumatic loss of his family during the war.

The novel then moves back in time to World War II and the story of a Jewish girl named Lola living in Sarajevo in the 1940s. Nazi forces remove Jews forcibly from the city, and Lola becomes a Partisan fighter. Just when she believes she will be caught, she is instead rescued by Serif Kamal, the kustos of the National Museum. He takes Lola and brings her to a safe place in Italy, and while she is at the house, he also comes into possession of the Sarajevo Haggadah. He saves the book from Nazi looters and moves it to a family library in the mountains outside the city.

In the present, Hanna discovers that some missing clasps in the manuscript have been stolen. Other oddities include the facts that the insect’s wing belongs to a common alpine butterfly, that the salt in the binding of the book is sea salt, and that the chemical makeup of the stains on the pages contain not only kosher wine but also traces of blood. Hanna's investigation of these oddities lead to imagined narratives in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, Venice in the early 17th century, and 15th century Tarragona and Seville during the Spanish Inquisition.

Through these historical narratives, Brooks uncovers imagined narratives of the Haggadah in the hands of an Inquisition censor named Giovanni Vistorini and a Jewish rabbi with a gambling addiction named Aryeh. The book is written and bound by a devout Jewish man named David Ben Shoushan whose son is a converso, or Christian convert, named Reuben Ben Shoushan. On the eve of the Jewish exile from Spain, the book is saved from burning by David’s daughter, Ruti Ben Shoushan, who secretly studies the Kabbalah.

The clasps of the book are stolen by a bookbinder named Mittl, who has late-stage syphilis and uses the clasps to pay a Jewish doctor named Dr. Hirschfeldt for experimental treatments. Finally, Brooks reveals the true story of the book’s illustrator, a Black Muslim from North Africa named Zahra whose father taught her how to paint. When Zahra, who is enslaved, is sent to live with Netanel ha-Levi, a Jewish doctor living in Spain, she paints for Netanel’s son Benjamin, who is deaf and mute, to help Benjamin understand the complicated stories of his faith.

As these historical narratives are uncovered, Hanna has her own reckoning with the past. Her mother gets into a car accident and reveals that she was driving with Hanna’s grandmother, Delilah Sharansky. Hanna’s father is actually a famous painter who died of a brain tumor. Hanna learns more about her father as she travels for her work, ultimately ending up at the gallery opening for the Haggadah in Sarajevo. There, she realizes the original Haggadah has been stolen, but this is hushed up by her mentor, Dr. Werner Heinrich, who ultimately is revealed to be the orchestrator of the heist.

The novel ends when Hanna gets a phone call after six years in a new line of work, doing field conservation for the Sharansky foundation. She returns the Haggadah, found by Lola in a library in Israel, to Ozren, who atones for the sin of helping Heinrich steal the book. The Haggadah is returned, and during the process of returning the manuscript, the real identity of the illustrator is uncovered.