44 pages • 1 hour read
Geraldine BrooksPeople of the Book
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Hanna: Vienna, Spring 1996”
Hanna closes the report about the clasps and wonders where they could have gone. She visits the museum curator, who looks into Mittl, a bookbinder who was frequently used by the museum. After the Haggadah, he was not paid for his service and was never given work again. The curator agrees to look into Mittl and then invites Hanna out for a night on the town.
Hanna takes a plane to Boston, where she visits her mother in the block of hospitals that make up part of the city center. Her mother is giving a talk on giant brain aneurysms, taking down any opponents of her process, many of whom are middle-aged, balding male colleagues. She clearly has many admirers, and at the end the applause is “like the sound at a rock arena” (137). Hanna meets with her mother for tea, noticing her mother’s disappointment that she showed up. She asks her about Alia’s brain scans, and her mother quite brutally proclaims the child a lost cause. She denounces Hanna’s work, tells her that she doesn’t understand life because she isn’t a doctor, and then the two have a contentious tea. During this time, Hanna recalls something her mother told her, to explain the way she revels in her power and reputation: “It’s not for me. It’s for every nurse or female intern who has had to put up with being belittled and demeaned [...] all the women of your generation, who’ll never have to be harassed and leered at in the workplace again, because women like me struggled and survived” (136).
After visiting her mother, Hanna meets with Raz, a former lover and colleague at Harvard now running a lab at the Fogg in Boston. Raz runs a scan on the wine stains on the Haggadah and comes up with two congruent samples on the same page—kosher wine and blood.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Hanna’s relationship with her mother is the primary focus of this chapter—Hanna and her mother have conflicting definitions of what it means to be heroic, and Hanna’s mother more clearly solidifies as a symbol not only of self-doubt, but of the lifelong impact of struggle in the face of oppression.
Hanna’s mother makes a claim for the reasons she is always seeking to achieve more, to be better: “It’s not for me. It’s for every nurse or female intern who has had to put up with being belittled and demeaned [...] all the women of your generation, who’ll never have to be harassed and leered at in the workplace again, because women like me struggled and survived” (136). Despite her altruistic, feminist argument, Hanna has doubts. For Hanna, a heroic mother is a present mother, one who doesn’t belittle, demean, and ignore her own child. In this sense, Hanna’s mother appears as a conflicting symbol of what it means to be a “strong woman”—she is an incredible surgeon, an asset to her field and to the medical community, and a fighter against oppression in the workplace; as a mother, she has no connection with her daughter, the person who, in theory, she was fighting to protect from future persecution. In this way, Hanna’s mother is a complex character, and another example of the way that struggle against persecution has a lifelong impact on those who fight it.
Raz also appears in this chapter as a prime example not only of another talented scientist, but of a multicultural presence—“Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing” (141). Though this is only a moment, it does indicate the author’s larger interest in the complicated nature of race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage, and the ways that blending of culture and ethnicity can and will lead to a more empathetic world.
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By Geraldine Brooks
