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Geraldine Brooks’s “People of the Book”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Geraldine Brooks is at the Margaret Mitchell House tonight to talk about and sign her new novel, “People of the Book.” It”s the standard MMH schedule: reception at 6, show at 7, free for members, $10 for non-members.
Staff writer Kirsten Tagami interviewed Brooks for a story that ran in Sunday’s paper. For anyone who missed it, here is Tagami’s interview:
In her new novel, “People of the Book,” Geraldine Brooks takes a few historical facts and creates a story as richly detailed as the rare illuminated prayer book at the heart of the work.
It’s an approach she has used before, with great success. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006 for “March,” her imaginative novel about the life of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” set against the backdrop of the Civil War. Her fiction debut, “Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague,” re-created a year in an actual English village that sealed itself off from the outside world so as not to spread bubonic plague to others.
In “People of the Book,” Brooks, a former war correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an exquisite Jewish prayer book that survived through centuries of war and exile. She will speak about the book at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Margaret Mitchell House.
Q: This latest book is similar to “Year of Wonders” in that you’ve taken a fictional approach to history. And in both cases, I believe, you ran across the historical facts while working as a foreign correspondent.
A: Absolutely, yes. I was in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo and I heard about this Hebrew codex that was the treasure of the Bosnian collection that had gone missing during the war. There was a lot of intrigue around what had happened with it. And when I found out that it had been rescued by a Muslim librarian, who had taken it to safety during the course of the war, I just got really intrigued with the story. That’s how it tends to work with me. I like to find the stories from the past where we can know something but we can’t know everything. The history that you can research gives you a kind of scaffolding. The void in the record is the place where the imagination is free to work. There was nothing really known about how this book came to be created in Spain in the 15th century or even as early as the 14th century. Nobody knows who did the illustrations or who wrote the text. Nobody knows how it survived that terrible time of Inquisition and exile. It traveled across Europe and the Balkans only to go through a similar story all over again.
Q: Do you have any thoughts about what would have happened to this book if it had fallen into the hands of the Nazis?
A: I think that probably because it was such a recognized masterpiece by the time World War II happened, it probably would have been destined for Hitler’s Museum of the Lost Race. This was the totally depraved scheme that the Nazis had that after all the Jewish people had been killed, they would have this museum in Prague dedicated to looking at Jewish cultural artifacts. They had amassed an enormous collection of some of the most beautiful items of Judaica and also daily household objects and textiles and thousands of books. They were actually going to employ Czech actors and dress them up as Hassidic Jews and have them walking around this sort of Disneyland of Jewish life. You can’t fathom the depravity of it. But I think they would have wanted the Sarajevo Haggadah for that.
Q: It’s hard to imagine how they would have explained that these beautiful objects were created by people who, in their eyes, were less than human.
A: I think if you could understand that kind of thinking, it would be a worry. I couldn’t even try to fathom the contradictions in it. Also, a lot of things were sent to Prague and never made it there because the Germans were notorious looters. Things got purloined and sold off. The book might have been cut up for the little miniatures and sold off in pieces. It was pretty amazing it was kept out of their hands.
Q: Did you write about the book when you were there as a journalist?
A: I didn’t because when I was there, nothing was known. Nobody knew where it was. There were all kinds of rumors — that the Muslim government had sold it to buy arms, or that the Mossad had come in and taken it to safety. These kinds of stories were circulating, but nobody really knew until right near the end of the war, when the government sanctioned it being brought out of hiding and displayed at the Jewish community’s Passover celebration. Then the story was revealed that the librarian had taken it to safety amid intense shelling in the early days of the war.
Do we have any Geraldine Brooks fans in the house?
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By Lily Toad
January 15, 2008 3:14 PM | Link to this
I’m about 2/3 through People of the Book and am enjoying it immensely. Her characters are fully drawn, even if they only appear in 10 — 20 pages. Exploring the different journeys of the haggadah and how various items ended up in the binding or on pages (eg. a butterfly wing or a wine stain) is fascinating. I’ve also read March, which brings to life the abolition movement. I bought Year of Wonder but haven’t read it yet.