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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Wine Stains: Venice, 1609”
This chapter opens with a priest, struggling with alcohol withdrawal, who clumsily gives communion. His name is Giovanni Vistorini. He was an orphan, adopted by monks in Venice at age six, whose skill with languages made him the perfect candidate to become censor for the Inquisitor. Vistorini drinks and goes out into the street, meeting a friend, Judah Aryeh. The rabbi keeps his head down, and Vistorini wonders, “How many small humiliations had it taken to bow him over into that cringing stoop [...]” (151). The men discuss a book to be censored and get into an argument when Vistorini suggests Aryeh talk to the printer.
Later, Aryeh reveals his gambling problem. He asks a wealthy woman, Dona Reyna de Serena, for money for his congregation. She is a Jew pretending to be Christian to live a free life. Dona Reyna asks the rabbi to get the Haggadah approved by the censor, so she can leave Venice. The rabbi agrees. He then uses Carnivale, the festival of masks, to hide his Jewish identity and gamble the Dona’s money away. He is found out as a Jew and must flee.
In Aryeh’s meeting with Vistorini about the Haggadah, the men get into another argument. Vistorini says that the illuminations are heretical, and the book will either be redacted or burned. Aryeh protests, begging his friend. Vistorini is drunk and suggests a game of chance to save the Haggadah from the pyre. Aryeh cheats, using clues about the thickness of scraps of paper to win the game, and Vistorini becomes enraged and uncontrollable. He takes the Haggadah and dismisses his friend. Inebriated beyond control, Vistorini spills wine and cuts himself on a shattered glass, staining the Haggadah. He then has a crisis of his own identity. The drink and the Haggadah bring back memories of his childhood, and Vistorini begins to remember flashes of his parents, who were Jews, being taken away by powerful Christians. Vistorini rejects this reality, writing his own, Catholic name and the year in the front of the Haggadah as proof of his identity.
Chapter 6 Analysis
In this chapter, all books and not just the Haggadah become symbols of cultural exchange and the power of knowledge to make change. This is most clear when Aryeh says to Vistorini, the censor to the Inquisitor, “Your church did not want holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avodat ha kodesh, a holy work” (156). The idea of the book as a dangerous object is clear in this chapter, when books are being burned for the threat they pose to the Catholic church. Also clear is the idea of censorship—not only of written materials, but of the self. Both Aryeh and Vistorini are censoring themselves, and this is a common theme throughout the novel; sometimes that self-censorship is the product of survival, and in other moments it is a result of trauma and grief.
Names also play a prominent role in this chapter, when Vistorini’s drunken state reveals repressed memories of his Jewish childhood. For Vistorini, his Jewish name has the power to entirely uproot and ruin his identity and the life he has made for himself. A name has its own autonomous power because it defines how a person is presented in society. Like his friend Aryeh, who wears a literal mask to hide within society, Vistorini puts on the mask of his Christian name to hide his true identity, and the consequences of that identity, from others and from himself.
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By Geraldine Brooks
