This cast moves across centuries, from medieval Spain to besieged Sarajevo to a modern conservation lab, all orbiting the same illuminated manuscript: the Sarajevo Haggadah. The novel braids a present-day investigation with vivid historical vignettes, revealing how individuals—across faiths, languages, and wars—preserved a fragile book and, in doing so, pieces of themselves. Each character’s choices echo through time, binding the past to the present and turning a single artifact into a testimony of survival and connection.
Main Characters
Hanna Heath
Hanna Heath is the brilliant Australian conservator whose forensic study of the Haggadah anchors the present-day narrative. Guarded and wry, she prefers “objects, not people,” a stance shaped by a combative relationship with her mother, Dr. Sarah Heath, yet her curiosity compels her into other people’s histories and ultimately her own. Through clues—an insect wing, a white hair, wine stains, salt crystals—she reconstructs the book’s journey and confronts questions of identity and belonging. Her professional admiration for mentors Werner Heinrich and Amitai Yomtov is tested by betrayal and moral ambiguity, while her intense connection with Ozren Karaman forces her to risk intimacy. By the end, she claims her family story and steps toward emotional openness, embodying the novel’s meditation on The Relationship Between Past and Present.
Ozren Karaman
Ozren Karaman, the Sarajevo museum’s chief librarian, is the wartime custodian who saves the Haggadah during the Bosnian War, personifying Courage and Moral Choice. Proud, principled, and protective of his city’s multiethnic heritage, he meets Hanna as a skeptic and becomes her ally—and lover—despite scars from the sniper attack that killed his wife, Aida, and left his son, Alia, comatose. His grief makes intimacy perilous, yet his daily tenderness with his son reveals a gentleness he struggles to share. With Hanna, he wrestles with trust, mourning, and the weight of survival, ultimately recommitting himself to the ideals the Haggadah represents. His arc refracts a city’s devastation into a private, ongoing act of moral steadiness.
Lola
Lola is the young Jewish Sarajevo woman from “An Insect’s Wing” whose flight from Nazi persecution carries her into the Partisan resistance. Initially shy and unassuming, she proves resilient and practical—laundry skills against typhus, care for the mule, swift instincts that repeatedly save her life—while grief for her mother, Rashela, and sister, Dora, steels her resolve. She becomes a protector to fellow refugees Isak and Ina, and survives with the aid of Serif Kamal, the Muslim librarian who shelters her, foregrounding the novel’s theme of Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict. Her later rediscovery of the Haggadah at Yad Vashem in 2002 closes the circle, returning the book’s history to Sarajevo and to Hanna’s investigation. Lola’s story crystallizes the novel’s faith in endurance and the quiet heroism of ordinary people.
Supporting Characters
Serif Kamal
Serif Kamal is the National Museum’s chief librarian in 1941, a thoughtful, devout Muslim whose calm defiance saves both the Haggadah and a human life. With the quiet support of his wife, Stela, and the collusion of director Dr. Josip Boscovic, he risks everything to hide the book in a mountain mosque and to shelter Lola, enacting interfaith solidarity. His steadfastness embodies Courage and Moral Choice and counters fanaticism with conscience.
Giovanni Domenico Vistorini
Giovanni Domenico Vistorini is a Venetian priest and Inquisitorial censor in 1609 whose stamp—“Revisto per mi”—spares the Haggadah from the flames. A learned, alcoholic official haunted by a buried past, he is revealed as the orphaned Jew Eliahu ha-Cohain, living a divided identity. His fraught intellectual rapport with Rabbi Judah Aryeh and a moment of crisis before the manuscript compel him to defy his office and, in saving the book, acknowledge the self he has long suppressed.
Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek
Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, a Muslim artist enslaved in late-15th-century Seville, paints the Haggadah’s luminous miniatures with piercing empathy and craft. Valued by her Jewish master, Netanel ha-Levi, and bound to Isabella (Nura) through shared captivity, she channels observation into art that crosses religious boundaries. Secretly signing an illumination in Arabic and creating images for Netanel’s deaf-mute son, she turns beauty into resistance and authorship.
Ruti Ben Shoushan
Ruti Ben Shoushan, daughter of the Haggadah’s scribe in 1492 Tarragona, hides a fierce inner life behind meekness and the nickname “Sparrow.” Schooled secretly in Kabbalah by her lover, the bookbinder Micha, she defies danger to save her converso brother Reuben’s infant son and to spirit the Haggadah away as the Expulsion unfurls. Her devotion to family and text makes her a guardian of lineage and a vessel of The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts.
Dr. Sarah Heath (Hanna’s Mother)
Dr. Sarah Heath is a famed neurosurgeon and Hanna’s exacting, emotionally distant mother, whose disapproval has shaped Hanna’s self-protective shell. Her concealed love affair with the artist Aaron Sharansky—Hanna’s father—reveals a long, private grief and recasts her severity as a mask for loss. The late-breaking truth complicates mother and daughter, shifting Sarah from antagonist to tragic, human figure.
Werner Heinrich
Werner Heinrich is Hanna’s courtly German mentor and an eminent Hebrew-manuscript scholar whose authority and kindness veil a secret theft. Traumatized by wartime complicity burning Jewish books, he rationalizes stealing the “real” Haggadah as a rescue, attempting to place it in Israel. His betrayal fractures Hanna’s trust and exposes how unresolved guilt can warp moral judgment.
Amitai Yomtov
Amitai Yomtov, an Israeli Haggadah expert and former commando, first recommends Hanna for the conservation project and later moves in the story’s gray zones. Initially a suspect in the book’s disappearance, he proves a discreet intermediary working to retrieve the manuscript from Werner and return it to Sarajevo. His competence and pragmatism highlight the ethical complexities of cultural patrimony.
Minor Characters
- Dr. Franz Hirschfeldt: A Jewish physician in 1894 Vienna who acquires the Haggadah’s silver clasps from a desperate patient and refashions them into earrings for his wife and mistress, unwittingly fragmenting the book’s material history.
- Florien Mittl: The Viennese bookbinder who rebinds the Haggadah in 1894 and, ravaged by syphilis, steals the silver clasps to finance a doomed cure.
- David Ben Shoushan: Ruti’s pious father and the scribe who pens the Haggadah’s text as a wedding gift, anchoring the manuscript in family devotion.
- Aaron Sharansky: Hanna’s father, a rebellious Australian painter whose death during brain surgery haunts both Sarah and the daughter he never met.
- Delilah Sharansky: Hanna’s paternal grandmother, a Russian Jewish immigrant whose life bridges Australia and Boston; she dies in the car crash with Hanna’s mother.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The Haggadah is the story’s connective tissue, threading together makers, protectors, and inheritors across time. In the present, Hanna and Ozren form a partnership of wary equals: her forensic exactitude meets his custodial bravery, and passion collides with grief. Hanna’s private battle with Dr. Sarah Heath—seeking approval from an emotionally distant mother—intersects with her professional disillusionment when Werner Heinrich’s “saving” theft breaks the mentor–student bond, a counterpoint to Amitai Yomtov’s discreet, restorative intervention.
Across the historical chapters, protectors repeatedly risk themselves for people and pages: Serif Kamal shelters Lola and hides the Haggadah; Ruti Ben Shoushan preserves her nephew’s future and the manuscript; Giovanni Domenico Vistorini jeopardizes his position to sign the book out of danger. These acts forge an interfaith chain of care—Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic—mirrored by artistic and scholarly collaborations: Zahra’s illuminations for Netanel ha-Levi’s family, David Ben Shoushan’s scribing, and later hands who rebind, repair, or even pilfer the book. Conflicts—Hanna versus secrecy and betrayal, Ozren versus despair, Vistorini versus his divided self—sit alongside alliances formed in crisis, underscoring that cultural survival depends on fragile human bonds.
Patterns emerge in factions and groupings: guardians of memory (Hanna, Ozren, Serif, Ruti, Vistorini), wounded intimates (Hanna and Sarah; Ozren, Aida, and Alia), and compromised intermediaries (Werner, Florien, Hirschfeldt), each shaping the Haggadah’s fate. The novel’s emotional engine is this web of duty, love, loss, and ethical choice, where individual decisions reverberate across centuries.
Character Themes
- Identity and Belonging: Characters live at the fault lines of identity—Hanna’s search for family, Vistorini’s hidden Judaism, Zahra’s Muslim artistry in a Jewish household—probing questions explored further on Identity and Belonging.
- Love, Loss, and Family: Ozren’s grief, Hanna’s inherited love story, Lola’s obliterated family, and Ruti’s fierce devotion frame intimacy as both wound and lifeline.
- The Weight of the Past: Werner Heinrich and Dr. Sarah Heath act from unresolved trauma, showing how memory drives present choices and shaping the book’s meditation on The Nature of History and Memory.