Chapter 13 Summary
Opening Six years after Sarajevo, Hanna Heath lives under her father’s name in Australia’s far north, conserving rock art on the edge of mining blasts and rebuilding a life that was shattered by betrayal. When the real Haggadah resurfaces, Hanna is pulled back into danger, forced to face the men who broke her trust and to decide what kind of story she wants the book—and her life—to tell.
What Happens
Hanna: Arnhem Land, Gunumeleng, 2002
In the red expanse of Arnhem Land, Hanna has remade herself as a “desperation conservation” specialist, using the Sharansky Foundation (funded by Delilah’s inheritance) to protect ancient Aboriginal rock art from mining destruction. The change follows a brutal break with her mother, who confessed to letting Aaron Sharansky die on the operating table rather than live blind. Hanna cuts her off, takes Sharansky as her name, and finds a sense of place in the landscapes her father painted.
A call from Canberra’s DFAT drags her to Sydney and into a glass-walled office above the harbor, where diplomat Keith Lowery waits beside Amitai Yomtov. To Hanna’s fury, Amitai produces the real Sarajevo Haggadah in an archival box. She accuses him of theft—until he names the true conspirators: her mentor Werner Heinrich and her former lover, Ozren Karaman.
Amitai lays out the history. As a conscripted teen in Nazi Germany, Heinrich helped burn confiscated Jewish books; the trauma curdled into a zealot’s mission to “save” Hebrew manuscripts at any cost. After the siege, he convinced the grieving Ozren—newly widowed, his son dead—that Sarajevo wasn’t safe and that the Haggadah belonged in Israel. Using Hanna’s meticulous documentation, Heinrich orchestrated a flawless forgery and gaslit her into believing she’d botched her work. Years later, the real book arrived anonymously at Yad Vashem, an old man’s attempt at atonement. The plan now: Hanna must smuggle the real Haggadah back to Bosnia and persuade Ozren to help swap it for the fake. Choosing purpose over fear, Hanna makes a Courage and Moral Choice and agrees.
Hanna: Sarajevo, 2002
Sarajevo hums with life during Biram when Hanna steps into Sweet Corner to find Ozren—now director of the National Museum—thinner, greyer, and openly remorseful. He confesses the despair that made Heinrich’s argument sound like a lifeline, and together they sketch a “reverse heist.” In the dead of night they use Ozren’s access to reach the vitrine. As they lift the glass, a beam from Ozren’s flashlight grazes the seder illumination, where the saffron-robed woman’s hem shimmers with a line of microscopic calligraphy. Hanna leans in and reads the signature: the illuminator is a woman, Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, “the Moorish woman,” an African Muslim from Seville.
The revelation nearly derails the mission. They scramble to finish, swap the volumes and the security tapes, and slip out before the guards arrive. Safe in Ozren’s attic, they confront the last question: destroy the incriminating masterpiece of forgery or let it live. Ozren raises the fake over the fire, longing for the mercy of finality, then lowers it. The city has seen enough ash. Hanna decides to carry the forgery out of Bosnia, imagining it one day offered to Israel as part of the Haggadah’s tangled biography. Quietly, she reveals her own secret mark: before leaving Sydney she tucked a tiny Morton Bay fig seed into the real Haggadah’s binding for a future conservator to find. Ozren sets the fake on the mantel and reaches for her. This time, Hanna doesn’t pull away.
Character Development
Hanna Heath Hanna’s reinvention completes her arc from isolated technician to field-forged conservator with a moral compass. She embraces her Identity and Belonging as Aaron’s daughter, regains her professional self-trust, and claims agency in how the Haggadah’s story continues.
- Reclaims her name—Sharansky—and funds frontline conservation work
- Cuts ties with her mother after the surgical confession
- Accepts a risky mission to right a wrong done in her name
- Makes the field’s defining discovery: the illuminator’s identity
- Chooses reconciliation with Ozren over grievance
Ozren Karaman Ozren moves from grief-driven zeal to restitution. By helping return the book and sparing the forgery, he recommits to Sarajevo’s pluralist ideal.
- Owns his role in the theft and seeks to repair the damage
- Uses his position to enable the covert return
- Rejects symbolic purging (burning) in favor of preservation and healing
Werner Heinrich Absent but pivotal, Heinrich is a tragic antagonist shaped by childhood complicity in Nazi book burnings. His obsession to “protect” Hebrew culture collapses into ethical blindness, illustrating how the force of The Relationship Between Past and Present can warp principle into fanaticism.
Themes & Symbols
The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts With Zahra’s hidden signature, the Haggadah reveals a new chapter after five centuries, proving that artifacts continue to speak when cared for by attentive hands. Choosing not to burn the forgery affirms that even imitations accrue meaning; the copy becomes a witness to the book’s modern trials. Hanna’s fig seed literalizes stewardship—planting future discovery—underscoring The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts.
Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict Zahra’s identity reframes the Haggadah as an interfaith creation: a Jewish ritual text illuminated by a Muslim woman in medieval Spain. The book’s survival—saved over centuries by Christians and Muslims—culminates in a return engineered by Jewish and Bosnian allies. The novel’s closing chord argues for Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict as the crucible in which shared cultural treasures are made and preserved.
Book Burning Fire shadows every era: inquisitorial pyres, Nazi bonfires, the shelling of Sarajevo’s library, and the hearth in Ozren’s attic. By refusing to burn the fake, Hanna and Ozren reject purification through destruction and embrace an ethics of memory—keeping even the uncomfortable parts of the story alive.
Key Quotes
“Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek.” Hanna’s reading of the illuminator’s signature solves the novel’s central mystery and expands the Haggadah’s authorship beyond expected boundaries, anchoring interfaith creation in a single name.
“the Moorish woman” This sobriquet situates Zahra in Seville’s cosmopolitan past, marking the book’s origins in a cross-cultural milieu and amplifying the theme of coexistence.
“Let it be the last book ever burned in this city.” Ozren’s plea gathers centuries of loss into one refusal. Deciding against the fire transforms vengeance into care and turns the attic scene into a manifesto for preservation.
“The Haggadah is a test.” Framed as a moral trial, the book challenges characters and nations to choose shared humanity over fear, pushing the story’s ethical stakes into the present.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The finale resolves the whodunit, the why, and—most thrillingly—the who behind the illuminations, while restoring Hanna’s confidence and reweaving her fractured relationships. By returning the real Haggadah to Sarajevo, the chapter threads restitution through romance, ethics, and art history, closing the circle without erasing its knots. As the Full Book Summary culminates, the novel affirms resilience, coexistence, and an expansive view of cultural memory: the answer to centuries of erasure isn’t more ash, but the deliberate keeping of every page—including the forged ones.