Every Picture Tells a Story: The Sarajevo Haggadah

People of the Book: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks (2008) is a popular book of Jewish historical fiction. It explores various times and places of Jewish history by tracing the journey of The Sarajevo Haggadah, originally created in the fourteenth century.

Kiddush, etc.

The author portrays what life was like via imaginary characters. Muslims are shown in a most sympathetic light (except for one story). I found the Inquisition story very disturbing; torture is graphically described. The stain in the Haggadah, that I always assumed was wine, is said to be blood. The book is reminiscent of James Michener’s The Source (1965), except that the stories are in reverse chronological order in People of the Book. I know many people love this book and that it is a popular Book Group selection. I found the writing not as polished as I would have liked. I was especially disappointed by the absence of any pictures since the plot refers to the Haggadah’s illustrations so often.

spills on "Ha Lachma Anya ..."

One important plot point has to do with the fact that a reproduction is never entirely the same as the original. Digital copies of a picture, no matter how small the pixel size is, will never be quite like a painting done by hand. And certainly copies of the things that get spilled or dropped on a book  as it is used will not be the same as the actual spillage. I think this relates to the interest in the analog qualities of music records as opposed to the digital audio files that have mostly replaced them. Anyway, ….

The book I really want to recommend this week is the library’s facsimile edition of The Sarajevo Haggadah. Half the book is English commentary and history by Cecil Roth; the other half is a reproduction of the original on shiny paper. The more recent, unfortunately exciting, history of the Haggadah happened after this version was published. It is mentioned in Geraldine Brooks’ novel.

 

Reed Sea; Miriam

Creation

The Haggadah starts with pictures of Creation and the origins of the Jewish people.

Wise and wicked sons

The illustrations are brilliant and the Hebrew is surprisingly readable. It was exciting to see two of the four sons, Hacham (wise) and Rasha (wicked),  highlighted in decorative borders on facing pages.

Every page is beautiful. It reminded me how important the visual appearance of books is. I’m toying with the idea that one problem with too many Jewish ritual books is that there are no pictures. Why can’t we have a siddur with cartoons?

Two illustrated 20th-century Haggadot in our library are by Arthur Syzk and Ben Shahn; Cecil Roth is connected to these books as well. And there are others on display on top of the bookcases in the children’s  section of the library.

Next week I’ll talk about some books that you can use to get ready for and celebrate Passover.

Meanwhile, if you would like to comment with recommendations about Haggadot (and foods and activities) for the Seder, I would be most appreciative: After about a quarter of a century (wow!), I think I’ve done all I can with the Conservative movement’s Feast of Freedom and my husband is eager for a book that has page numbers.

Love at first footnote — Burnt books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka by Rodger Kamenetz

Rebbe Nachman's chair

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka by Rodger Kamenetz contains lots of fascinating bits about Kafka and the Hasidic rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav, and their surprising similarities. He shows that not only did Rabbi Nachman probably influence Kafka, since Martin Buber had translated Nachman’s stories and made them accessible to a wider Jewish world, but also that one might argue that Kafka influenced Rabbi Nachman—if not directly, then at least in the minds of present day readers of Rabbi Nachman, who live in a Kafkaesque world. Roger Kamenetz has some wonderful insights and interesting anecdotes, but the book does seem a little disjointed. This is not a biography nor a literary analysis and yet Kamenetz must retell the lives and stories of his two subjects enough for us to understand what he is talking about. Both men burned some of their work, died young, and worried about God and evil. I was glad to see that Kamenetz feels that the wise man who joined the turkey prince under the table understands what to do because he himself has been there. The book is carefully foot- and end-noted and has a detailed chronology and a good bibliography.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

But no shattering is permanent, because the process of redemption is also ongoing. This applies in our personal lives, as Rabbi Nachman tells us beautifully: “If you believe that you can damage, then believe that you can repair.” [p. 18-19]

Rabbi Nachman’s Hasidim had reason to doubt the reality of God’s justice, and must have grappled privately with the heretical thought that “there is neither judgment nor judge.” [p. 23]

Kafka died just before Heisenberg’s famous work was published, but as an assimilated Jew Kafka already lived an emotional and social uncertaintly principle. That is why his parables exhibit wave-particle duality, Jewish if looked at one way, German if another. Harold Bloom calls this literary indeterminacy “evasion,” but that doesn’t mean that interpretation is hopeless. There’s a probability curve of meanings: once the reader makes a choice, the other meanings collapse. [p. 178]

I especially like  Kamenetz’s using theories from physics in this quote to explain literature. Although, I don’t think that other meanings collapse forever, just for the current choice; i.e., the reader is free to make a different choice at another time. Readers also are entitled to live uncertain, variable lives that change their choices as they observe the world and are observed by it. (No, I don’t really know what I meant by that last bit, I just like the parallelism of it.)

More favorite quotes:

To believe that evil and injustice are inherent to God’s universe [as the priest in Kafka's The Trial implies] goes against our deepest sense of justice and goodness. It requires a certain humility to grasp this concept. For instance, one would have to give up completely the idea of judging God. [p. 193]

That conversation everyone quotes between Kafka and Brod, where Brod asks if he is a Gnostic and Kafka says no, he doesn’t think the world is pure evil and created by a malevolent being, the demiurge. Maybe it’s not so drastic, Kafka says: maybe Creation is just a bad mood of God. “He had a bad day.” So is there hope asks Brod, who is more sentimental than his friend.
Yes there’s hope, Kafka says, “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us.” [p. 209]

The wise man in “The Turkey Prince” knew how to go under the table and even go naked, because he had been to such an extreme place himself. [p. 232]

True to form, [Kafka] replied, “Theoretically I am always inclined to favor proposals such as those made by Herr Scholem, which demand the utmost and by so doing achieve nothing.” [p. 250]

A more intriguing proposition is that Franz Kafka actually influenced Rabbi Nachman. This is, in a very exact sense, preposterous.1 [p. 8]
Footnote 1. Etymologically pre- “before,” post- “after,” “preposterous” means that which comes after pretending to come before. [p. 317]

I fell in love with the book at the first footnote. The intense passion did not last, but the book and I remain good friends.