People of the Book

Afterword

People of the Book is a work of fiction inspired by the true story of the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. While some of the facts are true to the haggadah’s known history, most of the plot and all of the characters are imaginary.

I first heard of the haggadah when I was a newspaper reporter, in Sarajevo to cover the Bosnian war for The Wall Street Journal. At that time, the city’s fire-gutted library reeked of burned pages after the barrage of Serbian phosphorous shells. The Oriental Institute and its marvelous manuscripts were in ashes, and the National Museum of Bosnia was splattered with the shrapnel of frequent shelling. The fate of the Sarajevo Haggadah—priceless jewel of the Bosnian collections—was unknown, and the subject of much journalistic speculation.

Only after the war was it revealed that a Muslim librarian, Enver Imamovic, had rescued the codex during the shelling and hidden it for safekeeping in a bank vault. It was not the first time this Jewish book had been saved by Muslim hands. In 1941, Dervis Korkut, a renowned Islamic scholar, smuggled the manuscript out of the museum under the very nose of a Nazi general, Johann Hans Fortner (later hanged for war crimes), and spirited it away to a mosque in the mountains, where it remained safely hidden till after World War II. While these heroic rescues were my initial inspirations, the characters to whom I have ascribed these actions in the novel are entirely fictional.

The haggadah first came to the attention of scholars in Sarajevo in 1894, when an indigent Jewish family offered it for sale. Art historians were excited by its discovery because it was one of the earliest illuminated medieval Hebrew books to come to light. Its discovery called into question the belief that figurative art had been suppressed among medieval Jews for religious reasons. Unfortunately, scholars were not able to learn much of the book’s creation other than that it was made in Spain, possibly as early as the mid-fourteenth century, toward the close of the period known as Convivencia, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in relative peace.

Of the haggadah’s history during the tumultuous years of the Spanish Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion of the Jews nothing is known. The novel’s chapters “A White Hair” and “Saltwater” are entirely fictional. However, there is a saffron-robed, black-skinned woman at the seder table in one of the haggadah’s illuminations, and the mystery of her identity inspired my inventions.

By 1609, the haggadah had found its way to Venice, where the handwritten inscription by a Catholic priest named Vistorini apparently saved it from the book burnings of the pope’s Inquisition. Nothing is known of Vistorini beyond the books that have survived because they bear his signature. But many of the Catholic Hebraists of the period were converted Jews, and I used that fact in “Wine Stains.” In that chapter, also, the character of Judah Aryeh is inspired by the life of Leon Modena as described in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi, translated and edited by Mark R. Cohen. Richard Zacks provided an invaluable collection of materials on gambling in seventeenth-century Venice.

Because Bosnia was under occupation by the Austro-Hungarian empire when the haggadah came to light there in 1894, it was natural that it should be sent to Vienna, hub of culture and scholarship, for study and restoration. For the atmosphere in the city at that time, and especially for details such as the unctuous manners of telephone operators, I am in debt to the remarkable narrative history A Nervous Splendour by Frederic Morton. Similarly, Brian Hall’s The Dreamers and The Impossible Country provided indispensable insights. While it is true that, by modern standards, the rebinding of the haggadah was mishandled in Vienna, the matter of the missing clasps is a novelist’s invention.

Before writing “An Insect’s Wing” I had many long conversations with members of the family of Dervis Korkut, and am in especial debt to Servet Korkut, who was by her husband’s side and supported his many heroic acts of resistance during the fascist occupation of Sarajevo. I hope that the Korkut family will find my invented family, the Kamals, in sympathy with their humanistic ideals. For details of the experiences of young Jewish Partisans, I relied on the harrowing account by Mira Papo, which is in the collection of Yad Vashem, where the librarians were most helpful.

The librarians of Sarajevo are a very special breed. At least one of them, Aida Buturovic, gave her life as she saved books from Sarajevo’s burning library. Others, such as Kemal Bakarsic, took immense risks, night after night, to evacuate collections under dangerous conditions. Enver Imamovic, as previously noted, saved the haggadah during a period of intense shelling. I am grateful to both men for speaking to me about their experiences, and also to Sanja Baranac, Jacob Finci, Mirsada Muskic, Denana Buturovic, Bernard Septimus, Bezalel Narkiss, and B. Nezirovic for their help and insight.

For assistance with research and translation, I would like to thank Andrew Crocker, Naida Alic, Halima Korkut, and Pamela J. Matz. For introducing me to the Parnassius butterfly at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I’m grateful to Naomi Pierce.

Pamela J. Spitzmueller and Thea Burns of Harvard College Library were generous with their stories of the sleuthing aspect of book conservation. In December 2001, Andrea Pataki very kindly allowed me to be one more presence in a very crowded room while she worked on the real Sarajevo Haggadah under heavy guard at the European Union Bank. I would not have been able to observe her meticulous work without the intercession of Fred Eckhard and Jacques Klein of the United Nations.

For letting me spill kosher wine on bits of old parchment, for explaining the fine points of video spectral comparators, and for being an Aussie when I wasn’t sure that the career I’d invented for Hanna was all that plausible, I am thankful to my paysan Narayan Khandekar at the Straus Center for Conservation. While I learned a great deal about the career and the technical aspects of conversation from both Andrea Pataki and Narayan Khandekar, the fictional characters Hanna Heath and Razmus Kanaha bear absolutely no resemblance to either one of these real-life professionals.

I would not have had access to all the riches of Harvard’s libraries and museums were it not for a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, for which I am most grateful to Drew Gilpin Faust. Judy Vichniac led an amazingly supportive staff at the institute. The Radcliffe fellows, especially the members of the Tuesday writers’ table, helped shape my thinking and writing in myriad ways.

I also relied heavily on the insights of my early readers, especially Graham Thorburn, the Horwitz team of Joshua, Elinor, Norman, and Tony, Rabbi Caryn Broitman of the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, sofer stam Jay Greenspan, Christine Farmer, Linda Funnel, Clare Reihill, Marie Anderson, and Gail Morgan.

Thanks hardly seem adequate for my editor Molly Stern and my agent Kris Dahl, who are, as ever, my indispensable supports and two of the most formidable professionals in publishing.

Lastly and most of all, I have to thank Tony and Nathaniel, inspirations and welcome distractions, without whom nothing is possible.