People of the Book: A Novel (Geraldine Brooks)

Another exiting and unputdownable historical novel by Geraldine Brooks. At least as good as Caleb's Crossing.

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Quotes:

‘We’re different in Sarajevo.’ That’s what we all thought. How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church?

WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all. Werner Heinrich, my instructor, taught me that. “Never mistake yourself for an artist, Miss Heath. You must be always behind your object.” At the end of a week, there probably weren’t ten people in the world who could have told for sure that I’d taken this book apart and put it back together.

“And tonight, please let me take you out to a part of Vienna where you can’t get Sacher torte and I can absolutely guarantee that you won’t hear a waltz.”

“As to secrets, Father, I have but one: if the congregation expects a sermon of forty minutes’ length, then give them one of thirty minutes. If they expect thirty, then give them twenty. In all my years as rabbi, I have never once had a soul complain to me that a sermon was too short.”

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

“No,” he said. “Not now. You know I am not a religious man. But Hanna, I have spent many nights, lying awake here in this room, 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.”