People of the Book

Sarah is a skilled neurosurgeon at the top of her field. She is also deeply critical of her daughter, Hanna, and generally standoffish and secretive. Sarah believes that the reason she behaves the way she does is because she had to fight to advance in her career, arguing that she is a feminist warrior who is paving the way for nurses and female doctors who deserve to be treated with respect. Despite her success in her working life, Sarah is woefully emotionally stunted, and Hanna eventually cuts ties with her. 

Heinrich, a talented German book conservator and expert on ancient Jewish texts, is Hanna’s advisor in book conservation. He is haunted by the work he was conscripted to do during World War II, when he worked burning books and other precious Jewish art for Rosenburg. He turns out to be the man who created the fake manuscript and brought the Haggadah secretly to Israel—he was concerned the book would not be safe in Bosnia and wanted to save another precious book from being burned.

Ozren is the chief librarian of the National Museum and the preserver and caretaker of the Haggadah during its missing period. When the museum was being bombed, Ozren went into the museum and rescued the Haggadah, risking his own life. Ozren’s wife was killed by a sniper during the war, and his son Alia was eventually killed from an injury sustained during that shooting. Ozren has an affair with Hanna and helps Werner steal the Haggadah, though he regrets it almost immediately and ultimately helps Hanna return the book to its rightful place. 

Lola is a young Jewish girl living in Sarajevo in 1940. She works for her mother as a laundress and attends meetings of young intellectual Jews at night in secret, many of whom chose to leave Sarajevo to make a new home for Jews in Palestine. Lola yearns for love and adventure as the Nazis move closer to Sarajevo, and gangs begin to roam the streets looking for Jews to harass. Lola ends up being forced out of the city when Nazis invade, and she becomes a Partisan fighter. Serif harbors her, and she moves to Israel in her older age. She finds the Haggadah in a museum library in Tel Aviv. 

Serif is the chief librarian at the National Museum and a specialist in the study of ancient manuscripts. He is appalled by sacking and looting of museums by Nazis, against antisemitism and in support of Jews and the preservation of their culture at all costs. He harbors Jews and saves the Haggadah, keeping it in his family’s library in the mountains. Later, he is charged as a Nazi collaborator because he is a risk to the Communist government in Bosnia.

David was a Jewish man and sofer, or “a scribe of God’s holy language” (220), living in Tarragona, Spain in the late 1400s. His son is a convert to Christianity and an exile of the Jewish community, which causes problems for the family during the Spanish Inquisition. David writes the Haggadah and uses images he acquires from a deaf-mute orphan boy to illustrate the book. He is killed by guards for the Inquisitor when he won’t reveal the location of his daughter, Ruti. 

Ruti is David Ben Shoushan’s daughter. She comes across as timid, but she is a secret student of the Zohar and Kabbalah and has a married lover that her parents don’t know about. She remains safe during the brutal slaughter of her family by the Inquisitor, and she saves both the Haggadah and the child of her brother from death.