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A FAMILY TRADITIO

helped the next generation of Korkuts
to escape from war in Kosovo. The
article ends with an amazing reunion
in Israel.
This true story, Brooks explains,
unfolded in the
course of her
researching the novel,
and she wanted to
- find a way to tell this
episode factually.
She did most of the
reporting for the New
Yorker story once the
novel was finished,
although she had
been in contact with
several of her sub-
jects over the years.
Brooks, who was
born in Australia,
first learned about
the existence of the
Sarajevo Haggadah while covering the
Bosnian War as a reporter in Sarajevo
for the Wall Street - Journal; there were
rumors that the treasured book had
been sold for weapons or skirted out
of the country by the Mossad.
On Passover 1995, the Haggadah
was brought to a community seder,
where leaders of the city's other
religious communities also were
present. Brooks learned then that a
Muslim librarian had cracked open
the museum's safe in order to protect
the Haggadah during the shelling of
the city — and that got her thinking
about the many chapters surrounding
this book.
"I love finding these stories in his-
tory where you know something,
but you can't know everything; and
so you've got the license to let your
imagination fill in the voids:' she says.
She did meticulous research, studying
tools and techniques of bookbinding,
illumination and restoration; rhythms
of life in medieval times; tactics of the
Inquisitioners; rules of book censor-
ship; lifestyles of fin-de-siecle Vienna;
the experience of young Jewish par-
tisans during World War II; and also
the spirit of La Convivencia, when
Jews, Muslims and Catholics lived in
peaceful and productive co-existence
in Spain.
The novel opens in Sarajevo in 1996,
when Hanna Heath, a 30-year-old
Australian book conservator, is begin-
ning the work of inspecting and sta-
bilizing the Haggadah, under the aus-
pices of the United Nations. The first
conservator to handle the manuscript
in a century, she finds a fine white hair,
a fragment of an insect wing, wine

and other stains on the pages, and
these become clues, each prompting
a section of the book that takes place
in a different city: 1480 Seville, 1492
Tarragona, 1609 Venice, 1894 Venice
and 1940 Sarajevo.
Each of -these his-
torical tales conjures
up the Haggadah
story's players, many
of whom sense the
significance of the
book but have no
idea that their roles
will prove conse-
quential.
Linking these
stories — and serv-
ing as bookends
to them — is the
contemporary tale of
Hanna's discoveries,
with complexities of
romance, family and international pol-
itics. When Brooks began writing, she
cast the conservator as a Bosnian, but
the voice didn't work until she made
her "an Aussie," she explains. "Then
Hanna emerged and muscled her way
into the book in a much more sig-
nificant way than I intended." Hanna's
mother, a top surgeon in Australia, is
extremely tough on her very likable
daughter.
Ozren Karaman, the Sarajevo
Muslim who heads the museum
library and protected the Haggadah,
tells Hanna that there must be a reason
that the Haggadah came to Sarajevo, as
though to show people that what unit-
ed them was greater than what divided
them, that "to be a human being mat-
ters more than to be a Jew or Muslim,
Catholic or Orthodox."
Brooks talks about her own back-
ground with an upbeat ease. She grew
up Irish Catholic in Australia, attend-
ing convent schools. Her father's fam-
ily has deep roots in the U.S., dating
back to 1630 Massachusetts. He was
a big-band singer and while having a
wonderful time touring Australia with
his American band, he was abandoned
by the bandleader, who took off with
his pay. So he joined an Australian
ensemble.
During World War II, his mates
decided to enlist in the Australian
army, and he followed. They were
assigned to an entertainment unit and
sent to, among other places, Palestine,
where he became very taken with the
people he met. Over the years, Brooks'
father became an "ardent lefty Zionist"

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