Ramona Koval: Today Pulitzer prize winner, Australian writer Geraldine Brooks with her new novel, People of the Book, in which she imagines the fate of a medieval Hebrew manuscript as it makes its way from Spain through to Sarajevo, saved throughout 700 years.
In Barcelona in the early part of the 14th century a wonderful manuscript was created -- possibly for the wedding of two young people from important Sephardic Jewish families. It was a Haggadah, which is Hebrew for the story-telling, a collection of prayers and songs and tales recited each year at Passover in the homes of Jews all over the world for the Festival of Freedom, commemorating the exodus of the Jewish slaves from Egypt led by Moses, 3,500 years ago.
It was both a beautiful and an unusual document, for despite an interpretation of the Old Testament warning against idolatry, this book begins, reading from right to left, with 34 full page miniatures, starting with the creation of the world and finishing with the death of Moses -- and continued with an illuminated Haggadah text of hymns and Torah readings.
Until the Sarajevo Haggadah was discovered, it was believed that there were no illuminated Jewish texts. One can only imagine the circumstances in which it was then transported from Spain -- most probably in 1492 -- with the expulsion of Jews during the Inquisition, and how it found its way to Italy and moved to Sarajevo. And imagining this journey has been the task of Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer prize winning novelist for her book March, and former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
Her new novel, People of the book, is set in 1996, when Hannah Heath, an Australian rare book expert, is hired to restore the Sarajevo Haggadah. And as she restores the book and researches its provenance, we are taken back in time to see how it survived the different eras when its existence had been threatened, again and again.
Geraldine Brooks is on the phone from Brisbane. Welcome to The Book Show, Geraldine.
Geraldine Brooks: G'day, Ramona.
Ramona Koval: Now I'm excited about this book because I've actually seen the Sarajevo Haggadah. I was in Sarajevo in 2001 and made a program about it and wrote a little essay about it. So I've seen this beautiful manuscript in the vault in the bank. You have a description of a scene very much like the one I had experienced myself.
Can you talk about how the Sarajevo Haggadah came to your attention?
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, I was working as a journalist, it was long before my novelist days, and I was in Sarajevo reporting on the UN Peacekeeping mission and what they were and were not able to do in the city under the siege. And at that point the Sarajevo Haggadah, the great treasure of the Bosnian Museum Library collection was missing. And nobody knew where it was. And there were all kinds of rumours, 'cause you know how reporters love a rumour. So some people said that the Muslim government had sold it to buy weapons, and others said that Musad had come to take it to safety in Israel. And other people, said, no, no, it got destroyed in the phosphorous bombings. So many books had been burned.
So I sort of filed that away, and thought must check into this, and towards the end of the war the book was brought out for the Jewish community Passover celebration, and it was revealed that it had been saved by a Muslim librarian who'd risked his neck to go in to the museum under shelling during the early days of the war, because he realised that this book was at risk.
Ramona Koval: You dedicate your novel to the librarians, don't you?
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, well the librarians are a gutsy bunch, and I have to say I was thinking first of the librarians of Sarajevo because the books that survived the terrible attack -- because the Bosnian war was not just a war against people, it was a war against the idea that people could live together, people of difference, people of different religions and ethnicities. And if you want to wipe out an idea you have to wipe out the record that such a civilisation has been flourishing for hundreds of years. So the National Library of Bosnia was targeted with incendiary bombs and the librarians actually formed a human chain under the shellings to evacuate the books, and one of them, Adam Viktorovich, was killed in that effort. And others just did very heroic things. But I was also thinking about librarians in the US recently who were the only ones who had the guts to stand up to George Bush's Patriot Act by refusing to hand over lending records to show what books people had been borrowing. So I think librarians as a group are underrated for their courage.
Ramona Koval: Yes. It's interesting, when you go to Sarajevo you can see that the National Library would have been targeted, because there are other buildings around that weren't targeted, and suddenly you think...
Geraldine Brooks: Oh, look, they were quite blatant about it, actually. You know the fantastically tough CBC correspondent Kate Adie, she took exception to the fact that the only hotel in town was the Holiday Inn -- rather inaptly named, given what was going on -- but that was where all the journalists stayed. And one night it had been really heavily shelled, and Kate hadn't got enough sleep and she was pretty cranky -- and that's a scary thought -- and so she went over and crossed the front line and demanded a meeting with the Serbian artillery commander, and said, 'Why are you shelling the Holiday Inn?' And he said, 'Madam, I wasn't shelling the Holiday Inn. I wasn't aiming for you, I was aiming for the building across the road.' Which was the Bosnian National Museum.
Ramona Koval: So, evidence there.
Geraldine Brooks: So they were quite up-front about what they were up to.
Ramona Koval: Tell me about the first time you actually saw the Sarajevo Haggadah.
Geraldine Brooks: I was very lucky. I'd been thinking about this story, and how wonderful it would be to tell it, and it had to be novelistically because there's so little factual material when you get back past the last century about who the creator of the book was and who the rescuers in the early centuries of its existence were. And so I knew it had to be a novel but I wasn't sure how to bind all these different stories together. And I learned that the UN was funding a conservation project on the book to get the binding stabilised so that they could put it on display.
Ramona Koval: It has a sort of 19th century binding, doesn't it? It's a vellum manuscript but it's got a 19th century kind of -- not very interesting binding.
Geraldine Brooks: It's a daggy binding. It was very inappropriate. It's a cardboard cover with just a floral piece of paper. It's not the right binding for a book of its beauty and quality and originally it would have had a much more lavish binding. But it was rebound rather clumsily in the 1890s in Vienna. And so they needed to check its condition because it had been so irregularly handled during the war when it was brought out of the museum and actually stuffed into a safe deposit box in the bank, which is not how you handle old parchments.
And so they'd called in a conservator and she was going to assess the book and do any necessary repair work on it. And when I learned that, I immediately started nagging everybody I knew at the UN to see if I could go and observe. And they allowed me to do so, and so I was in the room -- with a lot of guards I have to say -- everybody from UN peacekeepers to Bosnian priests to museum security to bank security...
Ramona Koval: 'Cause everyone's got an interest in it, haven't they?
Geraldine Brooks: Yes. And it was a pretty tense time straight after the war, too, so things were not stable in the city. And in comes this flying wedge of guards and at the centre of it is a man with a box and the box is sealed with wax and string and the bank has to break one seal and the museum has to break the other seal. And finally they open the box, and I'm beside myself at this point, and you still can't see it because it's wrapped in layers and layers of silk paper. And they unwrap it, and they unwrap it, and they unwrap it and they set it in the cradle for the conservator and you look at it and you go, 'All that for this?' Because the binding is so undistinguished. It's something you wouldn't look twice at if you saw it in a used book sale. But that would be your big mistake, because once you open it and you get to the old parchments themselves, these 600-year-old paintings look like they were painted yesterday.
Ramona Koval: They actually shine, don't they? They emanate...lapis lazuli and gold and reds...
Geraldine Brooks: Malachite and all these fantastic pigments that were very expensive at the time that these pictures were made, so it was obviously made for a very affluent family. And it's really remarkable -- I just actually saw the desk facsimile that's been made to date, is an edition of 613 volumes which is a significant number in Judaism because it's the number of the mitzvoth or commandments that Jews are supposed to follow. And one of these 613 is in the Rare Book Library at Sydney University. And I was able to visit it and it was like being with the Haggadah again, because you can actually see...the quality of the reproduction's so good you can see where the gesso is and where the gold leaf has pealed away and...
Ramona Koval: And where were these ones made -- because I got one in Sarajevo at the time.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, I've got one, too. More modestly priced than this rare edition. This one will set you back four grand.
Ramona Koval: No, I didn't pay four grand for it!
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, I got one for about $40 at the museum which is very nice. But this is a special one, so anybody who gets the chance should take a look at it some time.
Ramona Koval: The lovely thing about it is -- and you take this as a very clever way of telling the story -- is that when you look through the Sarajevo Haggadah it has all kinds of things like wine's been spilled or salt water's been spilled, which is also part of the Passover feast. But there's also some handwriting that looks like one of the kids...
Geraldine Brooks: Practising their letters, yes.
Ramona Koval: ...Some family somewhere over the last 700 years.
Geraldine Brooks: You can imagine them getting whacked up the side of the head when their parents caught them at it.
Ramona Koval: That's right, for practising their alphabet on the special vellum parchment. You don't know when that happened, or what happened... So it's obviously been used every year for Passover at some stage.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes indeed.
Ramona Koval: And you brilliantly decided that you would tell the story of things that had got in to it. Not just the markings on it, but an insect wing, or...
Geraldine Brooks: Yes. This is the holy grail for book conservators, if they can find any little bit of matter that might have got trapped in the binding, it might turn out to be a quill paring, and the kind of feather that the quill was made from might tell you something about who the scribe was and where he was, that you might not have known before. Or a breadcrumb can be a wealth of information, because chemical analysis can say what kind of wheat it was, and you might be able to figure out whether that's a variety that was common in a certain period.
So book conservators are like detectives in that way, so I decided that my fictional conservator would find an insect wing and a white hair and other matter in the book, and each of those little things would take us on a journey back to meet the people of the book; the creators and the rescuers.
Ramona Koval: Because it had been rescued, hadn't it? It's not just a story of how a book like that came into existence, but how it survived over 700 years. Tell us about some of the journey.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, because so many Hebrew books were lost, and we know it created in Spain some time in the 14th century and we know that from the illuminations themselves. They're a wonderful combination of very familiar Bible stories but through the prism of somebody who's living in medieval Spain, so Pharaoh looks just like a Spanish medieval prince, and when the plague of frogs arrives in the Pharaoh's palace it's entering through a Spanish bread oven of the medieval period. So it's all these kind of wonderful little glimpses of medieval domestic life as well.
And we don't know how it got out of Spain. Somebody must have rescued it at the time of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Because most Hebrew books were confiscated and destroyed at that time, and there are some very poignant testimonies of Jewish families talking about burying their books so that they wouldn't be destroyed -- but knowing they probably would never return to retrieve them.
And somehow it got to Venice, and it was there in 1609 and we know that because a Catholic censor working for the Pope's inquisition wrote a note on the manuscript itself saying that there was nothing against the Catholic Church's teachings within this book. And that saved it from being burned at that time.
And then some time after that it crossed the Adriatic and wound up in the Jewish community in Sarajevo, where it was in world war two when the Nazis sacked the city. And no less than a general came to the museum to demand this by then famous Hebrew codex, and a Muslim librarian risked his neck and deceived the general and carried it out of the museum under the general's nose and took it and hid it in a mosque, where it safely spent world war two -- where no-one would think to look for it.
And then it was of course rescued again in the 1990s. Again by Muslim hands.
Ramona Koval: So it's a symbol of Sarajevo, too, isn't it, because it is a particular -- it's a Jewish text but it's been saved by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes. It really epitomises the multi-ethnic ideal of that city. And it's really very beloved by all kinds of people in Sarajevo. I knew one family during the war, they didn't have money for food or fuel and they saw a used facsimile copy of the Haggadah in the outdoor market and they spent their last money on that. Because to them it was a symbol of what the city was fighting for.
Ramona Koval: Yes. It's an idealised version of what the city's fighting for. But the reality of what was really going on around the people must have been shocking.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes. I think that the city is recovering but its soul has been really damaged by the reality of what did happen. But then you know there are always, always people that can see through this horrible propaganda that says we must demonise the other who is not like us. And there are a lot of them in Sarajevo.
Ramona Koval: You've made your conservator Australian.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, that was fun. I was originally going to make her Sarajevo and to me everything is about having an authentic voice for the storyteller. And I just realised -- I had about 50 pages of this character and she just wasn't -- I wasn't getting that fantastic mordant wit and cynicism with the soulful sort of Slavic ness -- Sarajevans are such an interesting mixture of influences, and my character wasn't coming alive. So I binned those pages and I'm sitting there scratching my head thinking, what voice can I hear? What voice can I hear? And then I go, 'Crikey. I know a voice.' And I decided to make her Australian. And I wasn't sure really how plausible that was, that an Australian conservator would be working at that level. And a little bit later I was over at Harvard on a fellowship and I wanted to research how a conservator would look at a wine stain on old parchment. So I'd emailed over to the chief conservation scientist at Harvard, and he's been very helpful, and he said 'Get some wine and come on over to my lab. I've got some scraps of ancient parchments here and we'll splash some wine on the scraps and then I'll show you how I would analyse it.'
And so I got there with my bottle of kosher wine and my bottle of regular wine. Usually you don't bring those things into an art museum but they let me in and he came down to meet me at the desk and greeted me with a 'G'day mate.' So when I found out that the chief conservation scientist in the Harvard collections was a bloke from Melbourne, I felt a lot better about making Hannah Australian.
Ramona Koval: She's hungry for culture.
Geraldine Brooks: No, she's not. She's got plenty of culture. But people always say that kind of stupid thing to Australians, like, 'Oh, must have been a cultural desert there'. So I'm afraid I borrowed some of my own annoyances, having lived abroad a lot and how misunderstood Australia still is in some places. You have to explain to people...hello, the Indigenous people of Australia have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world, and plus we have a stake in all the world's artistic traditions because we are one of the most ethnically diverse cultures in the world. So why wouldn't we be interested in Bosnian manuscripts because part of Australia are Bosnians and Serbs and Croats -- and everything else you can think of we have.
Ramona Koval: So you've had to defend this character, by the sound of it.
Geraldine Brooks: No, no, not the character. But I gave Hannah my own response to some of the blockheaded comments that you get as an Australian when people say, 'Was it a cultural desert where you grew up?'
Ramona Koval: Are they still saying that to you?
Geraldine Brooks: Well, not so much now. But they used to when I first went to the United States in the early 1980s. I think Ross Campbell the great columnist put it very well, he said, 'Never has a people been so outshone by its fauna as Australia.' But they'd say, 'Australia! You have all those cute kangaroos!' And then the conversation would end.
Ramona Koval: Why is it, though, that this trope, this idea of the dusty manuscript hidden in the library and the coming upon it and it's being able to tell us stories -- we're still fascinated. Something as bizarre as the Da Vinci Code or the Celestine Prophecy, or Name of the Rose, even, Umberto Eco's book.
Geraldine Brooks: Uh! That was a great book. I loved that book.
Ramona Koval: I loved that book too, but it's very exciting to have the idea that we need to find a codex of some sort. Why do you think it is?
Geraldine Brooks: Well because there are so many of these books. we haven't even scratched the surface. I was just down at the State Library in Melbourne and they have a marvellous exhibition of medieval manuscripts opening there this week, and some of the stories are so much better than anything any novelist would ever make up.
Ramona Koval: Like what?
Geraldine Brooks: So the oldest Latin transcription of one of Ptolemy's most important scientific treatises. The original was destroyed in the Great Fire in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. But this Latin copy, through the most extraordinary series of adventures and nefarious doings, has wound up in the Melbourne library. But you'll have to get...It was stolen by a shady priest in Florence and then bought by a collector whose will was then challenged and -- I mean this book has passed through so many hands, and to think that it ended up in Melbourne.
And then another one they have there, they just rebound a very old missal and in the bindings they found an Asian flea, which was the carrier of the Black Death. Luckily very desiccated and very dead.
Ramona Koval: Isn't that interesting...
Geraldine Brooks: Yes. It's because the truth is so fabulous. I defy anyone to hear these stories and not think, my God, that's a great story, I want to write it...
Ramona Koval: And of course one of the most fascinating questions that you do put your mind to is how did these illuminated pictures get into this book when you weren't supposed to depict human form.
Geraldine Brooks: Yes, the commandment says 'Thou shalt not make any graven image or likeness of anything.' So for most medieval Jews that was taken to be total suppression of figurative art. And yet here's a book where they just go for it. And you have to think of a plausible reason for that. I had a lot of fun trying to come up with one.
Ramona Koval: The other thing that struck me is that they seemed to be pictures of the planets as round objects.
Geraldine Brooks: I know -- which is fascinating. So in 1350 some astronomers had figured out that the Earth was round but it was still a highly controversial idea. And people were still being sent to the stake for saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun. So this is a hot potato, and yet in the series of miniatures that shows the Genesis story, the creation of the light from the dark and the separation of the land from the water, and the creation of the animals and the plants -- it's all being shown enacted on a round Earth. So who was this artist who was already convinced of that, and confident enough to depict it in that way?
Ramona Koval: And how did you channel that answer?
Geraldine Brooks: Well, you'll have to read the novel.
Ramona Koval: Well I have read the novel, but...
Geraldine Brooks: It's to do with trying to look at the illuminations themselves, and there are so many wonderful mysteries, and one of my favourite illuminations is a depiction of a Spanish family seder. And the family is gathered around this table and on it is what would be on any Jewish table at any Passover today: the matzah, the hard-boiled eggs, the cups of wine, the father reclining on a pillow to show that he's a free man...and at the table, with this beautifully dressed Spanish family is an equally beautifully dressed African woman. So who was she? She's holding a piece of matzah in her hand. She's taking full part in the ceremony. But if you were African in Spain in the 14th century you were probably Moorish which meant you were probably Muslim. So the mysterious woman at the table -- I had to account for her too.
Ramona Koval: Well, the novel is called People of the Book. It's published by Fourth Estate. And, Geraldine Brooks, it's been a great pleasure speaking with you again.
Geraldine Brooks: Great to speak to you, Ramona.
In Geraldine Brooks's new novel People of the Book a young Australian book conservator travels to Bosnia to begin restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. In trying to discover the story of its miraculous survival, Hanna Heath sets in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect her life.