Opening
A forensic whisper in a medieval book pulls the story across centuries. In Vienna, Hanna Heath traces a butterfly wing, a white hair, salt, and wine to a missing pair of silver clasps—then the narrative leaps to 1894, where a desperate bookbinder and a compromised doctor make choices that scar the Haggadah itself.
What Happens
Chapter 3: Parnassius
In Vienna, Hanna, exhilarated by the butterfly wing she finds in the Sarajevo Haggadah, visits her fearsome former mentor, Universitätsprofessor Herr Doktor Doktor Werner Maria Heinrich. She remembers arriving years ago as an underprepared, stubborn Australian and persuading Werner to take her on; their bond has grown into something like family. Now he is frail, leaning on a cane, but still razor-sharp as she recounts the book’s clues: butterfly wing, white hair, salt crystals, a wine stain, and grooves where a pair of clasps once sat.
Werner considers the Haggadah’s clumsy 1894 rebinding and offers motives that range from petty spite—“revenge” for returning a treasure to the “provinces” of Bosnia—to the rising, institutional anti-Semitism of fin-de-siècle Vienna. He cites Arthur Schnitzler to sketch the era’s hostility, the ambient prejudice a young Adolf Hitler breathes like air. He arranges access to the museum archives so Hanna can read the record. Afterward, she phones Ozren Karaman to share the news about the butterfly wing. Ozren is elated: it supports the wartime legend that the museum’s kustos, Serif Kamal, smuggled the Haggadah to a mountain village to save it from the Nazis. He recounts Kamal’s fate—saving Jews and a priceless book only to be imprisoned as a “collaborator” by the Communists. The call sours when Hanna asks about his daughter Alia; guilt pricks her because she took the girl’s brain scans without permission.
At the museum, the punkish chief archivist, Frau Zweig, leads Hanna into a dusty basement. The first folder—bill of sale and a letter—places the Haggadah with Sarajevo’s Kohen family from the mid-18th century, likely brought from Italy. The second, an Oxford report, dwells only on the illumination. The third, a technical analysis by a Frenchman, M. Martell, seems dry until Hanna notices lines scratched out. Backlighting the page, she reads the ghost text describing “pair nonfunctioning, oxidized Ag [silver] clasps” with a “motif of flower enfolded by wing.” Then Martell’s composure cracks in the erased coda: “The clasps are extraordinarily beautiful.”
Chapter 4: Feathers and a Rose
Vienna, 1894. Dr. Franz Hirschfeldt, a fashionable specialist in venereal disease, treats the secrets of the city’s elite and loathes its hypocrisy. His afternoon shatters when his half-brother David, an army captain, limps in from a duel provoked by a civilian who invoked the new Waidhofen manifesto—the claim that Jews are “inherently without honor” and can neither be insulted nor demand satisfaction. The slur exposes the city’s codifying bigotry. Hirschfeldt’s last patient is Florien Mittl, a bookbinder wrecked by tertiary syphilis: paranoid, weak, and losing his sight. Hirschfeldt describes a risky, expensive arsenic treatment that Mittl cannot afford.
Hirschfeldt returns home and spots a single misfastened button on his wife Anna’s dress—the quiet evidence of infidelity. He confronts her, disgust curdling into rage, then flees to his mistress, Rosalind, only to find their affair is ash too. Meanwhile, Mittl staggers back to his squalid shop where the Haggadah awaits rebinding. He fixates on its magnificent silver clasps—rose and wing intertwined.
On Yom Kippur, Mittl reappears at Hirschfeldt’s door with the clasps, claiming they come from a family Bible, offering them as payment for the arsenic cure. His tears and shaking desperation move Hirschfeldt. He agrees, then hesitates with shame—and chooses to keep them. He imagines commissioning two pairs of earrings: the roses for Rosalind, the wings for his “Fallen Angel,” Anna. In that choice, the Haggadah’s clasps vanish from the book and reenter the world as private adornments, beauty severed from responsibility.
Key Events
- Hanna catalogs physical clues in the Haggadah—wing, hair, salt, wine—and notices missing clasps.
- Werner frames the 1894 rebinding within Viennese anti-Semitism and arranges archival access.
- In the archives, Hanna uncovers Martell’s erased note detailing silver clasps with a “flower enfolded by wing,” and his confession of their beauty.
- The narrative flashes back to 1894: Dr. Hirschfeldt navigates a city of “secret diseases” and rising nationalist hatred.
- Florien Mittl, ruined by syphilis, steals the Haggadah’s clasps.
- Hirschfeldt accepts the stolen clasps as payment and keeps them, solving the mystery of their disappearance.
Character Development
The chapters braid expertise, vulnerability, and compromise. Hanna’s meticulous craft opens doors to buried histories, while the 1894 figures reveal how private weakness can scar public artifacts.
- Hanna Heath: Confident in the lab and tender with her mentor, she confronts her own ethical lapse regarding Alia’s scans, hinting at boundaries she risks crossing for the work—and for connection.
- Werner Heinrich: Courtly, erudite, and aging, he carries the sorrow of 20th-century Austria; his avoidance of triumphal spaces and his warnings about the city’s past point to scars he never displays.
- Dr. Franz Hirschfeldt: Cynical, assimilated, and sharp, he is principled in discretion but compromised in love—and ultimately in ethics—when beauty tempts him.
- Florien Mittl: His illness erodes body and conscience; desperation channels into theft, making him an unwitting hinge between the book’s past and present.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters crystallize The Relationship Between Past and Present. Hanna’s lab clues invite science to speak, but only story answers. The archival ghost-text opens into a full historical scene, proving that objects hold not just residues but lives—each choice leaving a mark that later hands can read.
Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict hardens in 1894 Vienna as prejudice is inscribed into civic ritual and speech. The duel, the manifesto, and Hirschfeldt’s social rounds expose a society polishing its surface while rotting beneath. Against this stands Kamal’s wartime courage, which the present-day conversation resurrects.
Through Hirschfeldt’s decision, Courage and Moral Choice turns intimate. He could refuse stolen beauty; he does not. His lapse contrasts with acts of guardianship that save the Haggadah in other eras. And Love, Loss, and Family thread the chapters: Hanna’s filial devotion to Werner, Ozren’s ache for his daughter, and Hirschfeldt’s embittered marriage all shape how people handle what they most value.
- Symbol: Syphilis. A “secret disease” that mirrors the city’s concealed bigotry and moral decay—latent, contagious, disfiguring.
- Symbol: The Clasps. “Flower enfolded by wing” embodies the Haggadah’s beauty and vulnerability; once severed, they become tokens of desire and guilt, proof that artifacts can be commandeered by private need.
Key Quotes
“pair nonfunctioning, oxidized Ag [silver] clasps … motif of flower enfolded by wing”
“The clasps are extraordinarily beautiful.”
Martell’s technical cool fractures into awe. The shift from metals analysis to rapture reveals how beauty overwhelms scholarly distance—foreshadowing how beauty will also overwhelm ethics in Hirschfeldt’s choice.
a petty act of “revenge” for returning the book to the “provinces”
Werner’s phrasing captures the snobbery and resentment in Viennese cultural politics. The scare quotes underline how prejudice dresses itself as taste, masking hostility as curatorial judgment.
the Waidhofen manifesto declares Jews “inherently without honor”
The manifesto formalizes social contempt, translating hatred into rules of conduct. David’s duel injury turns ideology into blood, and the line points toward the lethal future this language enables.
Hirschfeldt plans the wings for his “Fallen Angel” wife
The pet name cloaks betrayal in romance. By mapping sacred imagery onto an act of theft, the line exposes how private self-justification can profane what is precious.
Hirschfeldt treats the city’s “secret diseases”
The euphemism names both venereal infection and Vienna’s covert moral illness. The phrase bridges body and body politic, making the clinic a mirror for the era.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters inaugurate the novel’s double helix: present-tense investigation twined with historical revelation. The immediate mystery—the missing clasps—resolves in 1894 through a theft born of illness and a doctor’s weak will, proving that the Haggadah’s survival is a chain of human acts, not a smooth line of custodianship. Dramatic irony intensifies the 1894 scenes: readers recognize in the duel, the manifesto, and Werner’s warnings the prelude to catastrophe. The book’s traces—wing, salt, stain, erased sentence—become testimonies, each one a fingerprint of choice.