People of the Book

“We did not believe in the war [...] We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.” 

Ozren speaks of the perspective of the Bosnians when the war began. Sarajevo was known for being multicultural, and so they did not believe war could come to them. He expresses his bitterness and pain in his sarcastic and harsh phrasing. 

“Lola did not think of herself as brave. She would not have described the feeling that took hold of her as courage. All she knew was that she could not leave Isak out there, exposed, struggling, alone.” 

In this chapter, set during World War II, Lola saves her friend when he cannot get a fire started. This passage indicates her bravery, which is drawn not from her own strength but from her desire to do what it is right. Her empathy for others drives her to do good things. 

“‘Come now,’ Serif said, realizing she was about to cry. ‘Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham.’” 

Serif speaks to Lola here, after she asks him why he would risk his life to save her when he is a Muslim. Serif speaks about the obligations we owe other humans, no matter their religion, and the power of empathy as a force of good in the world. 

“They found it a narrow place on a high shelf, pressed between volumes of Islamic law. The last place anyone would think of looking.” 

This quote speaks to the sanctity of libraries in the novel. It comes just after Serif hides the Haggadah in his family library in the mountains. Among Islamic books, nobody will think to look for it, because they don’t assume cultures mix. 

“[A] charge of collaboration was a useful way for the Communists to get rid of anyone who was too intellectual, too religious, too outspoken. He was all of those things.” 

This quote is about Serif and his six year imprisonment under Communist leadership. It speaks to the power of knowledge and the threat that knowledge poses to oppressive regimes. 

“And then, quite suddenly, Hirschfeldt stepped out from behind the wall that years of training and experience had erected [...] he allowed himself to be [...] moved not as a doctor is moved by a patient, to a safe and serviceable sympathy, but as a human being who allows himself full empathy with the suffering of another.” 

This passage comes when Dr. Hirschfeldt, a Jewish doctor, is moved to help Herr Mittl, a Christian man. Hirschfeldt sees Mittl’s suffering and takes the stolen book clasps instead of payment. Hirschfeldt is struck by a powerful empathy that allows him to help a man in need, despite his depraved condition. 

“It’s not for me. It’s for every nurse or female intern who has had to put up with being belittled and demeaned [...] all the women of your generation, who’ll never have to be harassed and leered at in the workplace again, because women like me struggled and survived.” 

Sarah speaks in this quote. Hanna remembers a moment when her mother tried to explain to Hanna the value of her mother’s career. Hanna reflects on the way her mother was persecuted at work and how that influenced her criticism and inflated sense of importance. 

“Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing.” 

Hanna speaks here about her ex-lover and good friend Raz. She thinks he is beautiful and loves that he is symbolic of the blending of so many cultures. 

“Your church did not want holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avodat ha kodesh, a holy work [...] we called it ‘writing with many pens’ [...] I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscious requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.” 

Aryeh speaks to his friend Vistorini here about why he will not talk to a printer about not making heretical books. Aryeh does not want to limit his people to certain kinds of holy writing, when he himself does not believe in it. He sees it as being part of the enslavement of his own people.

“[F]rom what you’ve told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again [...] a society where people tolerate difference [...] then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize the ‘other’—it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society [...] It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to it all.” 

Raz speaks to Hanna as they discuss the Haggadah. Raz notices the way that the whole history of the book has a central message of cycles of comingling and persecution. The book is a symbol of this history.  

“I was trying to recast myself as someone who belonged in this setting, someone half Russian Jewish. Someone who could have been going through life named Hanna Sharansky.” 

Hanna is sitting shiva for her grandmother Delilah when she thinks this. She has just learned the identity of her father and met his family. She wonders how this new identity changes the way she views herself, as a person, and how that can be summed up in the shift of a name. 

“Renato, Father. I was baptized Renato. My name is Renato del Salvador.” But the Father insists, “‘Reuben Ben Shoushan,’ the priest repeated, as if he had not heard [...]” 

Here, Renato, the son of David Ben Shoushan, is rejected by a priest who is interrogating him about his Jewish heritage. He has been caught with Jewish religious artifacts and is accused of converting his wife. His name is rejected because the priest does not believe Renato is a true Christian. 

“Why hadn’t she told me? At least I would have grown up with [...] the ability to look at the beauty he left behind.”

Hanna is thinking here about why her mother did not tell her who her father was for so many years. Hanna stands in front of one of her father’s paintings in the Tate in London. She is devastated by the loss not only of the man, but also of the knowledge, for so long, of what he left behind. 

“[...] the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.” 

Hanna names the many characters of the story here as she tries to write about the history of the Haggadah and what she has discovered. She talks about how the Haggadah has linked all these people, herself included, in a common thread of history. The Haggadah symbolizes these people and their lives. 

“Do you think you are the only one brought here bound and humbled? The emira herself walked through the gates of this city in chains [...]” 

Hooman speaks to Zahra in this quote, reminding her that she is not the only one who is suffering and enslaved. Zahra feels a kinship to the emira, who she will soon meet and fall in love with. The idea of being trapped and exiled in a foreign place bonds these women and many other characters in the novel. 

“I can’t do this. I know what it is to be raped. You can’t ask me to assist your rapist.” 

Zahra speaks to Nura here. She has been tasked with painting Nura naked for the emir, but refuses. She can sense the pain this causes Nura and knows that doing it would defile a woman she respects. After this incident, Nura falls in love with Zahra because she finally feels respected and understood. 

“Freedom, indeed, is the main part of what I lack now in this place where I have honorable work, and comfort enough. Yet it is not my own country.” 

Zahra reflects on her life with Dr. ha-Levi in this quote. She thinks about how, despite her life of comfort and the restoration of her name, she still misses her home and her country. Being comfortable is different from being free and having her life back. 

“You will be sowing inter-communal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal.” 

Ozren speaks to Hanna here, on behalf of the National Museum. He tells her that he will not support her if she reports a falsified book and a theft to Interpol. Ozren reminds Hanna that this book is a symbol of peace and multiculturalism. To lose it would be not only a crisis but may start wars

“Well, why not kinderlach? The entire story of this book, its survival until today, has been a series of miracles.” 

After Lola finds the Haggadah in a library in Israel, a guard says this to her. She struggles to express the meaning of having this book return to her life after so many decades of grief. It gives her hope and allows her story to come full circle. 

“New name, new look, new life.” 

This is Hanna’s perspective after she changes her name at the end of the book. She takes on her father’s last name, cuts her hair, and takes a new job doing conservation in rural Australia. This quote reflects the significance of a name to Hanna’s identity. 

“I have spent many nights […] thinking that the haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.” 

Ozren speaks to Hanna after she comes to Sarajevo to try to return the Haggadah. Ozren speaks of the symbolic value of the book and its significance as a historical and political artifact. It is a symbol of the ways that people can come together despite difference. 

“There were so many anonymous women artists who had been cheated of the acclaim that was their due. Now, at last, this one would be known.” 

“There were so many anonymous women artists who had been cheated of the acclaim that was their due. Now, at last, this one would be known.” 

“I stared at the flames, thinking of the blackening parchments in a medieval auto-da-fe; of youthful Nazi faces lit by bonfires of burning books; of the shelled and gutted ruin, just a few blocks away, of Sarajevo’s library. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.” 

Hanna thinks about this scene as she stands with the false Haggadah before Ozren’s fireplace. She does not want to burn the book—burned books had a larger symbolic value. They indicated doom and persecution to come. For these reasons, she decides she cannot burn the book.