Geraldine Brooks got the idea for her latest novel in circumstances that Ernest Hemingway would have appreciated, said Janet Hawly in the Melbourne Age. It was 1995. Brooks, an Australian-born correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was in Sarajevo covering the Serbian-Croatian war. “I heard the idea in a war-zone bar, as journalist colleagues drank and discussed the day’s carnage,” she says. A 14th-century manuscript, the pride of the Bosnian National Museum’s library, had gone missing. The book—known as the Sarajevo Haggadah—was an important symbol of the multicultural values that Bosnia once exemplified, and rumors about its fate were making the rounds. Had it been sold for weapons? Had Israeli intelligence agents spirited it away? To Brooks, the truth was even better.
Brooks’ The People of the Book leapfrogs backward through history to re-create the many narrow escapes that have allowed the rare Passover account of the Exodus to survive 650 years of Europe’s intermittent religious clashes. In 1992 Sarajevo, the Muslim director of the museum dodged sniper fire and mortar rounds to smuggle the manuscript away to the safety of a bank vault. Brooks, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for her Civil War novel March, finds history to be full of similar hopeful moments. But every time humanity seems about to embrace diversity in beliefs and customs, she says, “this horrible fear of the other rises up” and smashes the dream. “We do it again and again,” she says. “It is so stupid.”
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