ANOTHER REVIEW OF PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, in the Globe and Mail:

Saving the Sarajevo Haggadah

AMI SANDS BRODOFF

January 19, 2008

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

By Geraldine Brooks

Viking, 372 pages, $28.50

The craze for memoirs and reality shows suggests a contemporary addiction to what really happened - the private made public before our very eyes - and, perhaps, a failure of imagination. Wrestling with truth in all of its contradictions and complexities demands active imagining, even the creation or transformation of a world: the province of the novelist. Novel, after all, means new.

In her latest work, People of the Book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks parlays her signature gift for marrying history with invention by imagining into the global journey and survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript, created in medieval Spain, contains the traditional text that accompanies the Passover Seder, the feast commemorating the Jewish exodus from Egypt, and is handwritten on bleached calfskin and embellished in copper and gold. Today, this manuscript is on display in a Sarajevo museum. People of the Book is a fictional account of the Haggadah's provenance and history, including its many close calls with destruction: the Spanish Inquisition's book burnings; fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism in Vienna; the Nazis' atrocities, and the Sarajevo siege of 1992. Of course, it is also the story of the people who created, rescued and preserved this codex.

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Brooks makes her ambitious story accessible, no mean feat considering that the tale weaves back and forth in time and whirlwinds from Sarajevo to Vienna and on to Venice, Boston, Tarragona, London, Seville, Jerusalem and back to Sarajevo. Whoa. To orient readers, Brooks unabashedly tells as well as shows, explaining when necessary through the voice of her trenchant narrator. Sophisticated readers may forgive the obvious, and those jet-lagged by the narrative pace will be grateful for signposts. The result will surely be a wide and diverse readership.

However, a number of wild plot twists and Hollywood-style coincidences threaten to cheapen the novel; the story is too strong to be tricked out with these gaudy contrivances. For readers who wish to tease apart which elements of the story stem from historical reality and which from the author's imagination, Brooks provides a helpful afterword. I confess: I read this first. I'll admit that I too am a victim of the need to know what really happened.

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