People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in Exodus “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of any thing” had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be rewritten.

They didn’t want to be descendants of leftists. Always it was the nationalist fanatics—Chetniks, Ustashe, the killers of the Second World War. Imagine wanting to be related to such people. I wish I’d known then that they were the storm crows. But we didn’t want to believe that such madness could ever come here.”

Her imagination peopled the dark with Germans, waiting to ambush them.

And then one day, as he patiently drew her out on some subject or another, listening to her opinion as if it were worthy of his consideration, and then guiding her subtly to a fuller view of the issue, she realized what the difference was. Serif, the most learned person she had ever met, was also the only person who never let her feel the least bit stupid.

“Werner, forgive me for asking, but, are you quite well?” “Liebchen, I am seventy-six. Very few of us are ‘quite well’ at that age. But I manage.”

stupefied it by this stream—no—this cataract, of unctuous courtesies….

THERE ARE ONLY 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE BI-NARY SYSTEM AND THOSE WHO DON’T.

“Don’t look for zebras.” “What?” “Just a saying. ‘If it has four feet, a long nose, and it eats hay, look for a horse before you go searching for a zebra.’” It was my mother’s saying, actually; something to do with her residents. Apparently inexperienced docs always want to diagnose rare syndromes, even if the patient’s symptoms fit some perfectly common condition.

“Well, from what you’ve told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’—it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.”

What I do is me, for that I came.

What was the saying? Christians raise the armies, Muslims raise the buildings, Jews raise the money.

“They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.” In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God.

When the emir learned of his wife’s pregnancy, he sent the doctor directly to her. Even in Ifriqiya, I had heard of this man, Netanel ha-Levi. His healing skills were as renowned as his poetry, which he wrote in a most beautiful Arabic. I had not thought a Jew could master our poetry, the language of the Holy Koran.

The wishes and desires of the powerful can be fickle things. I knew this. But I knew it in that deep place where one hides knowledge that is inconvenient, or too painful to admit, even to oneself.