People of the Book

Hanna is working in caves in rural northern Australia as a conservationist of Aboriginal cave paintings, some of which are more than 30,000 years old. She received an inheritance from Delilah Sharansky and was nominated to lead the board in her mother’s place. Taking her mother’s place on the Sharansky Foundation board, and the discovery that her mother had let her father die because she didn’t want him to wake up blind, lead to a permanent rift between them. Hanna left Sydney, took her father’s last name, cut off her hair, and only sometimes missed the fine craftsmanship of her old life.

In the field she gets a call from the Department of Foreign Affairs about her work in Sarajevo six years before. She goes to Sydney, where she finds Amitai. He has the original Haggadah. She accuses him of theft, but he explains what happened—Werner, paranoid the book would be destroyed in another Bosnian war, made the fake and convinced the grieving and disillusioned Ozren to replace it with the original. The original was moved to Israel, in the museum library, where Lola found it. Hanna is tasked with sneaking the manuscript back to Bosnia and convincing Ozren to return it.

In Sarajevo, Hanna meets Ozren at his apartment. He is older looking, but well-dressed. He has been promoted to museum director. He tells Hanna he regrets having ever agreed to Werner’s plan, saying, “I have spent many nights … thinking that the Haggadah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox” (361). Ozren uses his credentials to put the manuscript back, but looking at the original Hanna finds an inscription in tiny script on the illuminations, under red light. It names Zahra as the artist and Benjamin ha-Levi as the inspiration for the artwork. Hanna and Ozren take the fake Haggadah back to Ozren’s apartment, but ultimately decide not to burn it, because it, too, contains part of the Haggadah’s history.