Hanna Heath
Quick Facts
- Role: Protagonist and narrative anchor; an Australian conservator of medieval manuscripts tasked with examining the Sarajevo Haggadah
- First appearance: Opening chapters, arriving in war-scarred Sarajevo to begin conservation
- Defining object: The Sarajevo Haggadah—an illuminated Hebrew manuscript that has survived centuries of conflict
- Key relationships: Dr. Sarah Heath (mother), Ozren Karaman (librarian and love interest), Werner Heinrich (mentor), Delilah and Jonah Sharansky (grandmother and uncle)
- Hallmarks: Forensic attention to material clues; deep skepticism about intimacy; a life organized around the lab’s quiet order
Who She Is
At once scientist and sleuth, Hanna Heath treats the Haggadah as a living witness, reading its insect wings, a single white hair, and stains of wine and salt as hard evidence of human lives touching the page. Her meticulous craft turns her into the novel’s bridge, connecting the artifact’s physical residues to the people and eras that marked it. In doing so, she embodies The Relationship Between Past and Present: the present-tense investigator whose methods let the book’s buried histories speak.
Physical Details
Hanna’s self-image is spare and unsentimental: dark straight hair in a French twist; pale skin; a slender frame. What she fixates on are her hands—chapped, ruddy, and “wattled across the back”—the working tools of a conservator. Those “charwoman’s hands” reject her mother’s immaculate world and proclaim her allegiance to labor, materiality, and the touch that binds her to the book.
Personality & Traits
Hanna builds a fortress of precision and solitude—an identity crafted in the climate-controlled calm of the lab. Yet beneath her abrasive wit lies a quick, imaginative empathy that lets her “think into” the makers and saviors of the Haggadah. The tension between control and feeling drives both her most impressive deductions and her most painful missteps.
- Independent and solitary: “I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory...” Her preference for controlled environments shapes both her professional excellence and her emotional distance.
- Meticulous yet reverent: She holds advanced degrees and pairs scientific technique with respect for history, insisting that wear and damage are part of a book’s story, not detritus to erase.
- Intuitive historian: She fuses research with imaginative reconstruction—“an intuition about the past”—to inhabit the minds of unseen artisans and rescuers, propelling the novel’s historical vignettes.
- Cynical armor: Early exchanges with Ozren Karaman show her barbed sarcasm; it’s a defense that keeps vulnerability at bay until confronted by real grief.
- Emotionally guarded: Former partners note her pattern of “casual sex” without entanglement; even she admits she’s not “big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies.” Her guardedness is, in part, a reaction to her mother’s withering standards.
Character Journey
Hanna begins cocooned in the certainties of technique: microscope, scalpel, pH test—the rituals that quiet the noise of family and feeling. Sarajevo ruptures that safety. The Haggadah’s survival asks her to face the human risks behind every stain and fiber; Ozren’s devastation forces her to reckon with a world not padded by privilege. The accusation that she comes from “the safe world” stings because it’s true—until her investigation of the book spills into an investigation of herself. The shock of discovering her father is Aaron Sharansky, and of meeting the Jewish family she was denied, recasts her history and answers the ache of unbelonging with fragile new roots, deepening her sense of Identity and Belonging. By the end, adopting her father’s name and moving from medieval vellum to ancient Aboriginal rock art, she fuses vocation and heritage; the conservator of other people’s stories finally preserves a story that is also her own.
Key Relationships
- Dr. Sarah Heath: Hanna’s mother is a brilliant neurosurgeon and an expert at withholding. Her contempt for Hanna’s “kindergarten work” etches shame and defiance into her daughter’s identity. The revelation of what she hid about Hanna’s father reframes her coldness as a tragic, damaging choice, but not an exoneration; Hanna’s autonomy is, in part, a life built in resistance to her.
- Ozren Karaman: The Sarajevo librarian who saved the Haggadah embodies the stakes of history—loss, courage, endurance. Drawn to his quiet strength, Hanna also collides with the limits of her empathy; his grief strips away her defenses and exposes the cost of living in the “safe world.”
- Werner Heinrich: A mentor who feels like family, Werner teaches Hanna how to see with both microscope and imagination. His betrayal—engineering theft and forgery—forces her to separate authority from truth, sharpening her professional integrity even as it wounds her trust.
- Delilah and Jonah Sharansky: Meeting her grandmother (in death’s shadow) and uncle delivers the kinship Hanna has lacked. These ties restore not just a lineage but a cultural and moral context that reorients her future.
Defining Moments
Hanna’s arc crystallizes in scenes where touch, evidence, and emotion collide—moments that push her from technician to witness.
- First touch of the Haggadah: The book feels like “brushing a live wire” and “stroking the back of a newborn” at once—an electric, tender awakening. Why it matters: It yokes science to awe, announcing that the artifact is alive with human presence.
- The hospital confrontation: Watching Ozren by his child’s bedside, she meets a grief that her sarcasm cannot deflect. Why it matters: His rebuke—“Not every story has a happy ending”—shatters her illusion of neutral observation and implicates her in history’s pain.
- Discovering her paternity: In a sterile hospital setting, she learns Aaron Sharansky is her father and that her grandmother has just died. Why it matters: The personal mystery she never dared to test becomes solvable evidence; belonging ceases to be abstract and asks for a response.
- The forgery crisis: Publicly contradicted by Ozren and Werner when she identifies the displayed Haggadah as a fake, Hanna chooses her eye over their reputations. Why it matters: It’s the moment her craft becomes character—the courage to trust what she knows even against love and loyalty.
Symbolism
Hanna personifies the modern rationalist digging truth out of matter—microscopes, chemical assays, DNA—yet her “charwoman’s hands” insist that truth is tactile, earned through labor and care. As the interpreter between residue and story, she embodies The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts: every smudge a human fingerprint, every repair a testimony that the past persists inside the present. Her own life—piecing together a hidden lineage—mirrors her conservation work, making her both guardian and proof of the histories she restores.
Essential Quotes
I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit laboratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. This credo defines her sanctuary. The lab is more than a workplace; it’s a worldview—control over chaos—and explains why Sarajevo, and love, feel so perilous.
My hands are not what you'd call one of my better features. Chapped, wattled across the back, they don't look like they belong on my wrists... Charwoman's hands, my mother called them, the last time we argued. Her hands are both badge and battleground. They carry the dignity of craft and the stigma imposed by her mother, encapsulating the novel’s conflict between material work and sterile prestige.
To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history. Hanna’s ethic rejects perfection in favor of witness. She sees damage as narrative, not failure—an approach that guides both her conservation and her acceptance of messy, inherited truths in her own life.
A lot of what I do is technical; science and craftsmanship that anyone with decent intelligence and good fine-motor skills can be taught to do. But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. Here she articulates her superpower: disciplined imagination. The leap from data to empathy is what unlocks the Haggadah’s human histories and propels the novel’s time-traveling structure.
"You," he said, his voice a low, contained whisper. "You are the one who is consumed by bullshit... All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't." Ozren’s indictment punctures Hanna’s protective myth of safety. It is the emotional fulcrum of her transformation, forcing her to admit that expertise cannot insulate her from loss—and that real conservation includes conserving the truth of suffering.