What This Theme Explores
Identity and Belonging in People of the Book examines how selves and communities are assembled—often precariously—from history, memory, and choice. Rather than resting on religion, nation, or bloodline, identity emerges as a mosaic: professional calling, family secrets, moral courage, and the stories we inherit. Belonging, in turn, is not a fixed destination but an ongoing pursuit, shaped by displacement and danger yet sustained by small acts of recognition and care. The novel asks how we keep faith with who we are when the world insists on naming us otherwise—and whether connection can be built across lines that violence tries to harden.
How It Develops
The theme unfolds along two braided threads: Hanna Heath’s present-day investigation and a chain of historical vignettes tracing the Haggadah’s survival. Hanna begins as a brilliant, detached conservator whose professional competence masks a private rootlessness. Each physical clue she lifts from the book—a stain, a hair, a paint flake—pulls her into a deeper inquiry about origin and lineage, culminating in a reckoning with her own hidden past and a redefined sense of where and with whom she belongs.
In wartime Bosnia, the novel dramatizes belonging as a civic ideal and a fragile shelter. Lola, a Jewish teenager, survives by assuming a new name and faith under the protection of Serif Kamal, whose identity is anchored not in creed but in a pluralist Bosnian ethic. Decades later, Ozren Karaman voices the same multiethnic ideal—only to watch it crack under siege, his custodianship of the Haggadah becoming a last, defiant assertion of communal belonging.
Elsewhere, Vienna exposes how identity can be imposed from the outside: the Hirschfeldt brothers, divided by upbringing and degree of Jewishness, discover that an anti-Semitic society reduces them to a surname. In Venice, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini—a Catholic censor and secret Jew—embodies identity as self-division; his decision to spare the Haggadah becomes a furtive act of self-recognition.
In late-medieval Iberia, Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, a Muslim slave and artist, claims authorship by signing her name into a Jewish manuscript, asserting an identity no master can erase. As expulsion looms, David Ben Shoushan’s family fractures over conversion and survival, and Ruti Ben Shoushan uses ritual to declare a newborn’s place within a threatened people. The novel closes with Hanna’s own renaming, a choice that fuses lineage with vocation and turns private inheritance into public purpose.
Key Examples
The novel’s most vivid moments show identity being discovered, imposed, concealed, or chosen—and belonging remade through action.
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Hanna’s discovery of her heritage: Learning that her father is Aaron Sharansky ruptures Hanna’s long-held story of herself as unmoored and solitary. Her mother’s revelation forces Hanna to stitch together a new self-concept from pain, talent, and lineage—a process that deepens the book’s exploration of Love, Loss, and Family.
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Ozren’s Sarajevan identity:
“How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church?” His lament turns civic belonging into an ethical stance, not just a demographic fact. When war shreds this ideal, Ozren’s role as guardian of the Haggadah becomes an act of fidelity to a community that violence tries to deny.
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Lola’s assumed identity: Taking the name “Leila” and wearing a chador protects Lola while severing her from the markers that once defined her. The disguise underscores how identity can become lethal in a persecuting world, even as the kindness of strangers offers a provisional home across religious lines.
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Vistorini’s near-destruction and reprieve: As a censor sworn to root out heresy, Vistorini is poised to obliterate the manuscript that secretly calls him back to himself. Sparing the Haggadah, and signing his own name, becomes a ritual of self-acknowledgment—an admission that the identity he performs and the one he inherits can no longer be kept entirely apart.
Character Connections
Hanna’s arc models identity as an investigation. Professional rigor leads her to material truths about the Haggadah, but those clues also excavate family secrets she has been trained not to ask. By the end, renaming herself is less a rejection of the past than a capacious embrace of it—an assertion that belonging can hold contradiction.
Ozren’s devotion to a plural Sarajevo frames belonging as civic love. His insistence that mixed marriages and secular life define his city challenges ethno-religious absolutism; when the siege renders him alien in his own home, he channels loss into guardianship, keeping faith with a community that must be imagined before it can be rebuilt.
Zahra refuses the categories imposed on her—slave, foreigner, woman—by carving an authorship that crosses religious and cultural lines. Her signature in Arabic within a Jewish text is a quiet revolution: identity as craft and witness, not property or permission.
Vistorini embodies the violence of enforced singularity. His priestly mask and Jewish ancestry collide in self-loathing and drink; only by protecting the Haggadah does he act out a fragile reconciliation, choosing a deed that honors a heritage he cannot publicly claim.
Symbolic Elements
The Sarajevo Haggadah: As a Jewish ritual book illuminated with Christian techniques, created by a Muslim woman and repeatedly saved by Muslims, the Haggadah is identity made visible: layered, hybrid, and durable. Its survival argues for cross-cultural stewardship and aligns with The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts—the idea that objects can carry, and sometimes rescue, the selves we are not free to declare.
Sarajevo: A city of synagogues, churches, and mosques in near embrace, Sarajevo stages belonging as coexistence. Its wartime devastation literalizes what happens when rigid identities overwhelm shared life, sharpening the novel’s meditation on Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict.
Hidden names and disguises: “Leila,” Vistorini’s “Eliahu,” and Ruti’s covert ritual mark identity as both mask and vow. The secrecy that preserves life also wounds the self; revelation, when it comes, is perilous but necessary for belonging that is more than camouflage.
Contemporary Relevance
The book speaks to a world wrestling with migration, multiculturalism, and resurgent nationalisms. Hanna’s genealogical revelation mirrors contemporary quests to map ancestry through DNA, which often complicate tidy labels rather than confirming them. By dramatizing both the beauty of mixed communities and the havoc of purity politics, the novel offers a historical lens for current debates about who gets to belong—and shows how civic ideals, artistic inheritance, and moral action can knit a home across difference.
Essential Quote
“I am . . . I am . . . Am I . . . am I? Am I Eliahu ha-Cohain?”
Vistorini’s stammer fractures the very verb of being, enacting identity as interruption and self-doubt. His halting reclamation of a buried name captures the novel’s insight: belonging begins with a truthful admission of lineage, but it is completed by the courage to act in alignment with that truth.