BOOK REVIEW

Good reading & goodbye

This is my last book review for the Voice. My reviews have appeared on these pages for 35 years- that's a long time. Enough is enough! I started when this paper was no more that four to eight pages with Ben Friedman as the editor. I've since worked with Fredda Sacharow and, of course, Harriet Kessler who is always encouraging and helpful. My list of books ranges all over the Jewish literature spectrum- politics, fiction, history, biography and more. My reading and reviews have provided me with an education that goes beyond whatever I would have had in a university PhD program. I've also received recognition from the Voice readers that made me feel appreciated and respected. Many thanks to you my loyal readers. I will miss you.

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK by Geraldine Brooks. Viking, $25.95, 372 pp.

If you loved Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code you will thoroughly enjoy People of the Book. It concerns the mystery revolving around the Sarajevo Haggadah: Where did it originate? How do you explain the white hair embedded in the book? An insect wing? The blood, wine, and salt water staining some pages?

Hannah Heath, a wellknown rare book expert and book restorer is brought in by the museum director to solve the above mysteries; she, in turn, contributes her own drama- a previously unknown father, a famous physician mother, a romantic entanglement. So the book is a combination history, romance, family dynamics and much more.

Brooks, a well known novelist and journalist, won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel March that tells the story of Mr. March, father of the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women who goes off to fight in the Civil War.

Back to her latest novel. The People of the Book follows the famous Haggadah that was probably created in Spain perhaps as early as the 14th Century and has traveled (according to Brook's novel) from Seville where the illustrations probably originated to Italy, to Vienna, and other parts of Europe, ending up in Sarajevo.

The book is as much a mystery regarding the Haggadah as it is the story of Jewish acceptance, expulsions, persecutions, prejudice- in other words a history of our people.

During World War II the book was saved by a diligent museum director who hid the prize Haggadah from the hands of the Nazi. In an article in "The New Yorker" Brooks interviewed a descendent of this Sarajevo director who in 1942 took the book to a remote Bosnian village and hid the Haggadah among Korans and other Islamic texts for the duration of the war.

And again during the Bosnian War with the bombing and looting, Brooks has the book secreted to Israel and finally returned to the Sarajevo museum.

According to the book's afterword, Brooks encountered many difficulties with her research had extensive help in writing her novel.  mreich5759@verizon.net