The Multiethnic Ideal

There is an undercurrent of hope in novelist Geraldine Brooks’ writing. It is the subtle silver lining behind such dark-cloud settings as the American Civil War, the Spanish Inquisition and World War II.

“We as human beings have a wonderful capacity to make brilliant multicultural societies,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, which retells the classic Little Women from the point of view of the absent father who goes off to war.

Brooks, a former war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, will discuss her latest novel, People of the Book, which traces the 600-year multicultural journey of a priceless illuminated Hebrew manuscript through the eyes of a modern-day rare book expert, at 8pm Thursday, February 5, in Rockwell Hall at Buffalo State College.

The author is no stranger to Buffalo, having travelled here on journalistic assignments in the 1980s. She has also been a featured speaker at the Chautauqua Institution, to which she fondly refers as “my idea of heaven on earth.”

Brooks grew up in Australia, and though she mostly lives in the US now, that far-flung geography informs her writing. “Australians are very turned out toward the world,” she says. “We are all the way over there, and people have to come to us. We end up having a foot in all the world’s cultures. It makes us eager and very open travelers.”

Through 11 years on the Journal staff, she covered UN operations, and was assigned to Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. “War, sadly, was a permanent condition of that beat.” It brought her in close contact with a wide range of people and a multitude of stories, some best told through narrative fiction.

The famous Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images, stars in People of the Book. It is based on a true story, one that is clouded by an unknowable past—an irresistible combination for a history-loving novelist whose worldview is honed by present reality.

Today the precious Haggadah is back in the Bosnian museum “where it belongs,” says Brooks, who researched the book’s saga through many years and many places, including Sarajevo, a city she says symbolizes the survival of the multiethnic ideal. There it was a Muslim who hid the book from the Nazis during World War II.

Brooks extrapolated from this history, moving backward in time to imagine what could not be authenticated. “I was intrigued by the mysteries of this particular book,” she says. “I love to find these kinds of stories from the past…and I try to let the story tell me what I want to know.”

For Brooks, who told terrible truths as a war reporter, the novel offers a different and perhaps more compelling testimonial. As much as it withstood the worst of times, “this little book,” the Sarajevo Hagaddah, also witnessed the noblest of human impulses, in those few people who will stand up to tyranny in all its forms.

Imagining who were the original protectors of the book led Brooks on a series of mental and physical journeys. She traveled to Venice, exploring the old Jewish quarter, the place that gives us the name “ghetto.” She hung out in the back rooms of museums, enjoying “the license to find out how book conservators do their work, which is part art, part craft, and part science.”

Her novel is dedicated to librarians.

Geraldine Brooks is at work on another book about “faith in a time of catastrophe,” set at the time of the earliest white settlers coming to Martha’s Vineyard. The island is where she and her husband writer Tony Horwitz live with their two children. It is where they celebrated the election of Barack Obama, about whom she says she is “cautiously optimistic that he is the right man for these terrible times.”

The author’s Buffalo appearance is sponsored by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, Buffalo Seminary, the Bureau of Jewish Education, the Chautauqua Institution, the University at Buffalo Department of English, the Jewish Community Center Book Fair, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the National Federation for Just Communities, Nichols School, the Park School, Talking Leaves Book, Temple Beth Am, Temple Beth Zion, Westminster Presbyterian Church, and WNED.

The event will feature a display of rare manuscripts from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library and Temple Beth Zion, as well as information from the Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State College on the conservation of cultural treasures.