In Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, the Sarajevo Haggadah acts as both artifact and witness, carrying the fingerprints—literal and metaphorical—of the people and eras it survived. The novel braids a modern investigation with historical vignettes to ask how objects hold memory, how communities fracture and reconcile, and how individual choices alter the arc of history. Through Hanna Heath’s forensic attention and the book’s perilous journey, Brooks maps the intimate ties between past and present.
Major Themes
The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts
The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts frames the Haggadah as a living archive, its stains, hairs, and insect wing a palimpsest that records centuries of human touch. Hanna Heath’s conservation work “reads” the book’s body, revealing hidden narratives across Spain, Venice, Vienna, and Sarajevo—proof that history isn’t abstract but embedded in matter. The Haggadah’s survival through inquisitions, wars, and censorship affirms the resilience of culture and the moral duty to preserve it without erasing the marks of its journey.
Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict
Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict shows how the same societies that create art can also imperil it, oscillating between convivencia and persecution. Muslims, Christians, and Jews alternately protect and threaten the Haggadah: a Muslim scholar hides it from Nazis, a Catholic inquisitor spares it, Sarajevan librarians defy shelling to save it. Sarajevo itself—synagogue, mosque, and church within steps—embodies a fragile ideal that can be shattered by fanaticism yet restored by solidarity.
Courage and Moral Choice
Courage and Moral Choice elevates quiet, duty-bound acts over grand heroics, arguing that history turns on ordinary people who refuse indifference. From Ozren Karaman sprinting into a burning museum to Serif Kamal outwitting a Nazi general, to Lola choosing the Partisans, the novel spotlights decisions made at personal risk for the sake of others. Hiding a book, sheltering a child, or telling the truth becomes resistance—moral clarity in a world demanding complicity.
Supporting Themes
The Relationship Between Past and Present
The Relationship Between Past and Present structures the novel: microscopic traces in the Haggadah unlock sweeping histories, while Hanna’s lineage discoveries feed back into her present identity. The book is a bridge—science crossing into story—so that each recovered fragment reconfigures contemporary understanding and responsibility.
The Nature of History and Memory
The Nature of History and Memory rejects a single authoritative narrative; history is partial, contested, and must be actively reconstructed. Hanna’s forensic method corrects rumor and archive alike, showing how memory—personal and communal—is shaped by trauma, secrecy, and loss, yet can be made truer through evidence and empathy.
Identity and Belonging
Identity and Belonging explores rootlessness and inheritance, from Hanna’s fatherless childhood to conversos masking faith and Sarajevans navigating multiethnic loyalties. Belonging emerges not just from blood or creed but from chosen commitments—to a book, a people, a city—especially when identity is threatened.
Love, Loss, and Family
Love, Loss, and Family grounds the epic sweep in intimate stakes: a mother-daughter impasse, a widower’s grief, a lineage preserved by a desperate aunt. These bonds drive risk and sacrifice, linking private devotion to public courage and entwining the Haggadah’s fate with the families that guard it.
Theme Interactions
- Artifacts → Memory and Time: The endurance of the Haggadah enables The Relationship Between Past and Present; without material clues, there is no recovery of hidden histories, and The Nature of History and Memory remains speculation.
- Coexistence ↔ Moral Choice: Episodes of interfaith aid arise when individual conscience outmuscles collective hatred; Courage and Moral Choice counters sectarian violence and makes coexistence real, not ideal.
- Identity ⇄ Family: Discoveries about kin reshape self-understanding; Identity and Belonging is stabilized—or destabilized—by Love, Loss, and Family, as personal revelations reframe historical inquiry.
- Preservation Ethics ↔ History’s Scars: To conserve without erasing wear is to honor the conflicts the object survived, fusing the power of artifacts with an ethic that keeps memory’s wounds visible.
Character Embodiment
Hanna Heath embodies the power of artifacts and the entwining of past and present; her credo to preserve, not prettify, enacts a moral stance about history’s scars. Her search for her father and heritage ties identity to evidence, moving her from detached observer to participant in the book’s fate.
Ozren Karaman personifies duty-driven courage and the ideal of coexistence, racing into a shelled museum not for glory but for stewardship. His private grief sharpens the theme of love and loss, aligning personal mourning with cultural preservation.
Serif Kamal mirrors Ozren across time—risking everything to deceive a Nazi officer and spirit the Haggadah to safety—making moral choice the throughline that holds communities together when institutions fail.
Giovanni Domenico Vistorini dramatizes conflict within faith and identity; a censor with a hidden Jewish past, he protects what doctrine would destroy, revealing conscience as a counterweight to orthodoxy.
Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, the Muslim illuminator in a Jewish household, embodies the creative promise of interfaith collaboration; her artistry inscribes coexistence onto the very pages later threatened by intolerance.
Ruti Ben Shoushan fuses family love with radical courage, rescuing an infant and ritualizing survival amid expulsion—an act that safeguards lineage as history turns violent.
Lola transforms from laundress to Partisan, showing how war compresses moral choice into moments of self-sacrifice and resolve; her story refracts the novel’s insistence that ordinary people carry extraordinary burdens when hate ascends.