Possessed by History
By ELLEN KANNER
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
By Geraldine Brooks
384 pages. Viking Adult. $25.95
Geraldine Brooks seems an unlikely candidate to be, as she
puts it, “possessed” by Jewish history. It’s not reflected in her reportage of
Somalia and Bosnia, it’s not in the pages of Nine Parts of Desire, her first book, about the lives of Islamic
women, or in March, her 2006 Pulitzer
Prize-winning Civil War novel. Brooks grew up in Sydney, Australia, and she
grew up “very traditionally Irish Catholic.”
Yet she spent her teens poring over Holocaust accounts “and bad Leon Uris
novels. I wore a Star of David around my neck with my Catholic school uniform—that
was fairly confounding for the nuns,” she says, laughing.
Her passion for Jewish history and her fascination with “human beings in times
of catastrophe” converge in People of the
Book, a novel as richly wrought as the book it refers to, the Sarajevo Haggadah.
Though Brooks’ work is fiction, the Sarajevo Haggadah is entirely real. Saved
from Serb shelling during the Bosnian War, it dates back to medieval Spain and
is, as Brooks writes in People of the
Book, “a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish
belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind.”
Brooks was in Sarajevo writing for the Wall
Street Journal when the Haggadah was recovered in the 1990s. She didn’t
report on the Hagaddah, but she certainly knew about it. “It started to
fascinate me,” she says. It wasn’t the book’s beauty that captivated her or its
age, but its history.
“This was a book that survived so many catastrophes, yet that would always find
its rescuer,” says Brooks, speaking from her home in Martha’s Vineyard. “Two of
the ones we knew of were Muslim.”
Why would a Muslim risk his life for a Jewish text? That’s the story of People of the Book—or rather, one of the
stories. The novel follows the
Haggadah as it crisscrosses continents, spans centuries, and falls into the
hands of a priest, a scribe, an illustrator, a syphilitic Viennese man at the
turn of the century, and a Muslim librarian at the rise of World War II. Jews,
Muslims, and Christians are all, literally, people of this book.
The volume also falls into the capable hands of Hanna Heath, the Australian
conservationist hired in 1996 to analyze and restore the book. Brooks denies
any similarities between herself and her prickly protagonist, but they both
have a passion for Judaism instilled in them by their fathers.
The author might have been raised Catholic, but her father, she says, “was just
his own thing. He had a different religion—leftist politics. He had served in
Palestine during World War II. The socialist in him was lefty Zionist and he
was very interested in Israel.”
So, in turn, was his daughter, who recalls, “The Six-Day War was the first time
I ever read the paper. He brought it to life to me, describing a kibbutz he
sang at underneath the Golan Heights and why the Golan Heights were important
for Israeli security.”
Her father’s stories took root in Brooks’ head and heart and she converted to
Judaism in her 20s. “I’m your typical atheist Jew,” she jokes.
Brooks, 53, is married to author and journalist Tony Horwitz (Baghdad Without a Map and an upcoming
spring release A Voyage Long and Strange),
who was raised Jewish but endured what Brooks calls “a sorry-ass Jewish
education.”
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Brooks, her husband and their son
Nathaniel are active in their local synagogue. “We go to a shul we actually enjoy,” she says. “I find a great richness in the
ritual and ceremony. I don’t have any conviction about a deity, but Judaism
makes you notice daily things. It makes you notice life and honor it.”
That desire to honor life makes Brooks a scrupulous writer. Like Hanna, her
protagonist, she’s obsessed with ferreting out the truth. “I’m always trying to
be clear where fact ends and the fiction begins. I feel a responsibility as
writer to be true to the material, especially when you’re doing something as
presumptuous as messing around with people’s real history.”
Brooks might not even have turned to fiction, had she not been arrested in
Nigeria. “I was reporting about Shell Oil. They were in an unholy alliance with
a brutal military dictator.” He did not take kindly to her allegations and
arranged to have her arrested and thrown in a lock-up in Port Harcourt.
“Not a very scenic place,” Brooks recalls. “I didn’t know how long they were
going to detain me. I thought, ‘I’m 39 years old and I forgot to get
pregnant.’”
After Brooks was deported three days later, she made a point of remembering. Her
son was born the following year, and her days as what she refers to as a "shit-hole
correspondent" were over. She became a stay-at-home mom and a novelist. Yet
all her novels, including her much-praised 2001 debut Year of Wonders have fact at their core, and take place at a
pivotal moment in history. “I like to do research,” says Brooks.
Researching People of the Book led
her to the wife of the librarian who had saved the Haggadah over half a century
ago. “I almost fainted—she was still alive,” says Brooks. “It was a wonderful
gift to have her insights into that time.”
Facts, though, only take you so far in a novel. “When you can’t find out, you
have to imagine. You reach that moment when you take the big dive off into the
unknown.” Brooks has discovered a certain exhilaration in taking that dive. “Journalism
shows us snapshots of ourselves—journalism is how we are today. With fiction,
there is more delving into the emotional lives in an attempt to get at a human
truth.”
The truth, though, is not always pretty. The author is outraged by the growing
anti-Muslim sentiment in America, in Europe, and her own homeland. “It’s
ignorant and disgusting,” she says. “The Muslim veil has taken the place the peis had in World War II. It’s become
stigmata, the thing that brings some kind of pogrom down on people’s heads.”
That racism and intolerance makes the lessons of the Sarajevo Haggadah all the
more valuable. “This book has been a test all through its existence about
whether people are going to rise above what separates them. This book is
bearing an incredible weight at this time, a survivor of a multicultural ideal.”
That ideal, she believes, is still possible. “If it’s not, then what’s the
point? We’ve come so close so many
times, and when we do, the societies we create are so much richer and better.