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.
Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Hanna: Sarajevo, Spring 1996”
Hanna returns to Sarajevo late at night. The next day she goes to the museum to look at the exhibit, in a state-of-the-art temperature-controlled room, where the Haggadah would be kept. The room is immaculate, with perfect light and a lovely assortment of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim manuscripts and artworks to pair with the multi-cultural Haggadah. But as Hanna looks at the Haggadah’s pages, she stops in her tracks. The manuscript is not right. She runs to Ozren’s office and discovers both a pale-looking and disheveled Ozren and her mentor, Werner, sitting at his desk. Hanna reveals that the parchment is wrong on the Haggadah in the case, revealing that someone may have stolen the original and replaced it with a perfect fake. Hanna immediately suspects Amitai, who is an ex-commando for the Israeli military and who has incentive to steal the book. Ozren, Werner, and Hanna inspect each page of the manuscript, but Ozren and Werner claim to see none of the signs that Hana sees. Hanna wants to sound the alarm, but Ozren protests, saying, “You will be sowing inter-communal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal” (326). Hanna is enraged and storms out of the room.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Lola: Jerusalem, 2002”
Lola is living in Jerusalem in 2002, an exile from the former Yugoslavia. She now works on Saturdays as a janitor in a museum in Jerusalem honoring victims and survivors of the Holocaust and those who helped the Jews survive. There is a plaque in the museum’s garden honoring the man who saved her, Serif.
Lola talks about her life up to that point. She is grateful to have lived so long, and she mourns those she loves. Her family died either in transit or in concentration camps during the war. She becomes an honored soldier after the leader of Partisans comes to power in Yugoslavia, and she marries former Partisan leader Branko, who is abusive and cruel. Branko soon dies of wounds from the war, and Lola lives the rest of her life alone, taking a lover who is a truck driver from a kibbutz, but never marrying. The truck driver kept his distance, because he believed his wife might still be alive. Lola thinks, “I think he felt guilty that he had lived” (333).
Dusting the museum shelves one day, Lola finds that familiar book, the Haggadah. Holding it, she “was back in Sarajevo, in Effendi Kamal’s study, with Stela trembling beside me [...]” (335). She tells a guard, calling the discovery a miracle. He agrees, saying, “Well, why not kinderlach? The entire story of this book, its survival until today, has been a series of miracles” (336).
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
Hanna is doubted by her own mentor about the legitimacy of her knowledge of book conservation, and Lola discusses the measures she took to preserve herself—including marrying a violent and cruel man, just because “anyone who has shared a past with you becomes special” (331) when everyone else you know is dead. Though these decisions are wrong—Hanna’s decision to leave the false book without reporting it, and Lola’s decision to marry Branko—they come from self-doubt, from a loss of self. The women are bound together, tied by their shared struggle and the history of the book.
At the end of Hanna’s chapter, she is told she cannot report the loss of the original Haggadah because she “will be sowing inter-communal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal” (326). After so many years of violence, the desire for peace is stronger than the desire for truth. This is a complicated knot in the discussion of empathy in the novel and speaks to a larger cycle of violence in the history of the Haggadah. Though it is empathy and a desire for cross-cultural connection that drives Ozren to reject Hanna and her theories, this rejection only leads to more violence and less peace. Even in the push for peace, the Haggadah is a victim of struggles for power and the whims of those who are charged with protecting it.
Related Titles
By Geraldine Brooks
