What This Theme Explores
Love, Loss, and Family asks who counts as kin and what we’re willing to risk to keep them safe, remembered, and connected across time. In People of the Book, love is not confined to romance; it includes parental devotion, chosen bonds, and fierce acts of care that cut across religious and cultural lines. Loss is both private grief and historical catastrophe, shaping identity and moral choice. The novel suggests that families are built, broken, and remade by memory, ritual, and the stories that survive—often because someone loved enough to preserve them.
How It Develops
The theme first takes shape in the present through Hanna Heath, whose expertise with rare books contrasts with her inability to form durable human attachments. Her brittle independence is rooted in a lifelong estrangement from her mother, Dr. Sarah Heath, and a guardedness that treats intimacy like contamination. Meeting Ozren Karaman exposes her to a raw, unfathomable grief—his young son’s coma, his wife’s death—and to a fatherly devotion that persists even as hope dwindles. As Hanna follows the Haggadah’s clues, her scholarly pursuit becomes personal: the book’s lineage teaches her how love endures through loss, and primes her for the shattering discovery of her own father’s identity and the chance to reimagine who her family might be.
In the historical chapters, the Haggadah’s makers and guardians repeatedly choose love in the face of rupture. In 1480s Seville, the enslaved artist Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek paints to dignify a deaf-mute child and to honor a tender, forbidden bond with the emira Isabella—acts of creation that defy her profound losses. In 1492 Tarragona, scribe David Ben Shoushan is torn between doctrinal certainty and paternal love; his daughter Ruti Ben Shoushan transforms grief into guardianship by rescuing her brother’s newborn and ritually claiming him into their people. In 1609 Venice, the censor Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, a man severed from his Jewish family in childhood, unconsciously honors them by sparing the book he is meant to destroy. Later, in 1890s Vienna, the Haggadah witnesses marriages emptied of affection and desperate thefts in the name of family survival, reminding us that love can falter or be distorted under pressure.
The Sarajevo chapters bring the theme into stark relief. During 1940, Lola survives because her mother refuses to flee with her, sacrificing herself and a younger child so the elder might live. Lola’s rescue by Serif Kamal and his wife, Stela, models a gentle, chosen kinship that restores the possibility of home. Each episode folds back into Hanna’s present, revealing a throughline: when bloodlines are threatened, people reinvent family—and love, expressed as protection and remembrance, keeps both children and stories alive.
Key Examples
-
Ozren’s paternal ritual: Ozren reads to his comatose son every day, insisting a childhood cannot pass without stories. By honoring a developmental rite with no guarantee of response, he reframes love as faithful presence rather than outcome, echoing the Haggadah’s own survival as a story kept for a future that may not answer back.
-
Hanna’s discovery and grief: Learning who her father is, Hanna confronts a lifetime of withheld mourning in front of his painting at the Tate. The public unraveling reveals how secrecy and estrangement imprison grief—and how naming the dead (and the missing) begins to reknit identity.
-
Lola’s mother’s sacrifice: In the synagogue, Lola’s mother refuses to flee with her because the sick and the very young cannot keep pace; she insists, “Alone, you have the best chance.” Maternal love here is not sentimental but strategic, choosing one child’s survival over the whole family’s destruction and placing responsibility for memory on the one who can carry it.
-
Ruti’s creation of a new family: After losing her father and brother, Ruti rescues her newborn nephew, immerses him to claim him as Jewish, and gives him her father’s name. This is love as lineage work: ritual becomes a tool to counter erasure, and naming becomes defiance against the forces that unmade her family.
-
Vistorini’s repressed memory: The censor spares the Haggadah in a drunken, blood-stained moment of recognition, recalling his lost name—Eliahu ha-Cohain. His “censorship” becomes an act of reclamation, suggesting that buried love can surface as moral courage when confronted with the very artifact meant to be silenced.
Character Connections
Hanna Heath moves from isolation to kinship as the Haggadah teaches her that preservation is an act of love—toward objects, toward the dead, and toward the living who inherit both. Her conflict with Dr. Sarah Heath leaves Hanna wary of attachment, but tracing the book’s caretakers shows her that courage often takes the form of showing up for another person when there is no guarantee of safety or reciprocation. Discovering her father’s identity does not simply fill a biographical blank; it forces Hanna to accept that grief unattended corrodes intimacy, and that claiming one’s family—by blood and by choice—is a decision repeated over a lifetime.
Lola embodies survival through re-familying. Orphaned by genocide, she is welcomed by Serif and Stela, whose quiet, respectful marriage models a durable tenderness that the war tries to annihilate. Their home becomes proof that family is a practice—daily care, shared meals, mutual risk—more than a genealogy.
David Ben Shoushan, from the Tarragona, 1492 chapter, reveals love and law in collision. His repudiation of his converted son obeys communal norms, but when Reuben faces the Inquisition, paternal love resurfaces as action: he pours skill, time, and treasure into a book that might ransom a life. His daughter Ruti completes the arc, translating mourning into continuity by reconstituting family around a newborn.
[Giovanni Domenico Vistorini] wrestles with a loss so complete it has erased his name; his mercy toward the Haggadah is a backdoor through which memory reenters his life. His story challenges the notion that family is solely conscious choice: even suppressed love and identity can assert themselves in decisive moments.
Serif and Stela Kamal, central to the Sarajevo, 1940 chapter, demonstrate that the most radical act in times of hatred may be domestic: to keep a gentle household and enlarge its borders when someone knocks. By adopting Lola, they make protection itself a family value.
Symbolic Elements
The Sarajevo Haggadah: As a home-liturgical text, the Haggadah is engineered for transmission—its purpose is to seat generations at one table and move a story from mouth to ear, from parent to child. Its endurance through expulsion, censorship, theft, and war mirrors how families persist through fracture by repeating rituals that insist on belonging.
The Seder Illustration: The image of a family around the Passover table, including the enigmatic African woman, stages the novel’s central question: who gets a seat, and who decides? The illumination depicts inclusion before doctrine, suggesting that belonging is an act of hospitality that can outrun the boundaries of blood and custom.
The Silver Clasps: Forged from a mother’s marriage scroll case and bearing two family emblems, the clasps literalize union—two lineages locked together to hold a story safe. Their later theft is not only a crime against property but an injury to the idea of family as a protective binding.
Contemporary Relevance
In an age marked by displacement, war, and fractured identities, the novel’s insistence on “found family” resonates with refugees, adoptees, and anyone stitching together a life from partial histories. Hanna’s search mirrors modern genealogy’s boom and the reckoning with intergenerational trauma: what we don’t know shapes us as powerfully as what we do. The book also challenges narrow definitions of kinship, modeling inclusive households that form across faiths, languages, and borders. Above all, it argues that storytelling—at the table, in the archive, and across generations—is a survival tool for both people and love.
Essential Quote
“I stood there, thinking: My father made it... Standing there, with a class of English schoolkids dressed in kilts and blazers swarming around me, I lost it. I started to sob. First time in my life it had happened to me.”
This breakdown crystallizes the theme: love often arrives through recognition, and grief is the toll it exacts. In the public space of a museum—another kind of archive—Hanna finally admits a private longing, linking the preservation of art to the preservation of family. The moment shows that claiming one’s lineage can be both wound and repair, a necessary step toward building new bonds.