UPDATE 1/16/08: If you want to hear music from the Jewish Balkans, check out songs by Flory Jagoda on Nextbook.com. She tells the story about growing up in Bosnia before WWII, and sings traditional songs in Ladino, the Sephardic language.

Map by Laura Hartman Maestro, from inside front cover of People of the Book

I was lucky to hear Geraldine Brooks read at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC today. Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose new novel, People of the Book, follows the journey of a Haggadah (book recounting the Passover story and is traditionally read during the Passover seder) from its’ creation during the 14th-century convivencia in Spain to modern-day Bosnia. Amazingly, the novel is based on a true story.

Some friends were excitedly discussing Brooks’ essay on the Sarajevo Hagaddah, published in the Dec. 3, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, at a party last month [yes, my friends are nerds ]. Brooks begins her essay by stating that during WWII, the Nazis planned to create a “Museum of an Extinct Race” after completing the Jewish genocide, filled with looted Judaica. My friends continued to explain that, to prevent the special Haggadah from being stolen, a Muslim librarian named Dervis Korkut in Sarajevo hid the book in a local mosque until the end of the war.

The story intrigued me enough to attend Brooks’ reading and PowerPoint presentation. She began by showing pictures of Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia in the early 1990’s, where she worked as a journalist. The slides included pictures of the shelled-out Holiday Inn and the National Library burning, where the Haggadah was once again rescued by another Muslim librarian. These images were poignant to me, as I’ve been reading Joe Sacco’s graphic novel about the war in Bosnia, Safe Area Gorazde. Interestingly, Sacco also includes a few panels of the Gorazde public library partially destroyed from shelling.

Brooks also presented pictures of the illuminated manuscript, whose miniature paintings portray the Biblical telling of the earth’s creation, Moses telling Pharoah to “Let My People Go,” images of the ten plagues, and people at a Passover Seder. The illustrations are unique, since the Jewish religion traditionally forbids portraying human figures in art.

During the question-and-answer period, one attendant asked Brooks what she thought motivated the two Muslim librarians to risk their lives to save a Jewish book. She said, “Both of these men, like me, believed there should be no intellectual apartheid.”

Brooks inspired me, and also reminded me of the similarity between the Nazi Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Muslims during the war in Bosnia. In Robert Fisk’s documentary “From Beirut to Bosnia,” an imam says, “We feel that we are not wanted in Europe, and we feel that Christian Europe hates us because we are Muslims… They are killing me here because I am a Muslim.” Substitute “Muslim” for “Jewish,” and it is the same story. I hope that books like this can bring positive change, even for one person, but as Brooks said today, people are slow to change.