POB ~ discussion questions 31-37

A White Hair ~ Seville, 1480 ~ (pp. 273-316)

31. Where did the white hair come from (pp. 285-286)? And how were cat hairs used in the book?

32. An iconoclast is a person who destroys a culture's religious symbols. What had the iconoclasts done in this section of the book (p. 287)?

33. "Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book's scholars for a century" (p. 20) ... when I read that, I made a note: "Okay, I'm hooked; I want to know who this woman is." Now we know (p. 315). Who is she, and why is she in the picture?

Hanna ~ Sarajevo, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 317-326)

34. When Hanna returns to Sarajevo for the grand opening of the exhibit of the Hagaddah, she immediately thinks something's wrong with the book in the display (p. 321). How could she make such a major mistake, as her teacher and Ozren both try to tell her?

Lola ~ Jerusalem, 2002 ~ pp. 327-336)

35. What a way to reconnect with Lola, having her discover something hidden in the museum in Israel. Was this discovery a miracle? Or was it beyond believable to you?

Hanna ~ Arnhem Land, Gunumeleng, 2002 ~ (pp. 337-368)

36. "What skills could you possibly have, darling?" (pp. 343). Could you imagine Hanna's mother saying such a thing, even though she's trying to keep Hanna off the board of the Sharansky Foundation? Hanna responded in exasperation, "How is it ... that a man like Aaron Sharansky could have loved someone like you?" (p. 344). Is their mother-daughter relationship believable? What did you think about Hanna's decision to "change my name to Sharansky" (p. 345). Do you think they can ever heal the rift?

37. How would you feel if you'd changed your whole professional life six years ago, and now discovered you had been right all along?

POB ~ discussion questions 24-30

Hanna ~ Boston, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 191-214)

24. Marg said, "I was surprised by how quickly Hanna and Ozren fell into bed with each other." Zorro said, "She jumps in bed with Ozren on the day of their first meeting." What do you think of Hanna's reasoning, here?

I suppose I am a bit of a prude, about some things, anyway. I like loyalty. I mean, do what you like when you're single. Live and let live. Lay and get laid. But why bother to be married at all, if you don't want the commitment? (p. 197)

25. Will all humans someday be blended, like Raz (p. 141)? Is this the direction humanity is going? (See more in the post Benetton ad families?)

26. Delilah Sharansky, the Jewish woman introduced on page 202, died in the accident that hospitalized Hanna's mother. Why do you think Sarah Heath never told Hanna about Delilah or her son, the artist Aaron Sharansky? Hanna is very hurt by this lack of knowledge: "It was going to take me more than one night to catch up with thirty years of missing information. Missing love. ... in the end, she'd made all the decisions, and I'd paid for them" (p. 213). And again, "Why hadn't she told me?" (p. 261).

Saltwater ~ Tarragona, 1492 ~ (pp. 215-258)

27. What did you think of the story of Ruti, daughter of David Ben Shoushan and his wife Miriam? Ruti was enthralled by the text, the words, the meaning of the words. Ruti understood the text, "They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them," to mean, "In them, not in it. [God] would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence" (p. 234).

28. Look up Tomas de Torquemada, if you don't know much about the Grand Inquisitor. The chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov entitled "The Grand Inquisitor" is so important that it has been published as a small book, separate from the huge novel itself.

Hanna ~ London, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 259-272)

29. Ostensibly, Hanna is the one we are reading about here: "I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it" (p. pp. 264-265). Since this sentence provides us with a good explanation for the book's title, how well do you think Geraldine Brooks has done in giving us a sense of these people?

30. Were you expecting the death of Alia (p. 270)? Or had you hoped for a happy ending, in spite of Ozren's words to Hanna, "Not every story has a happy ending" (p. 37)?

POB ~ Benetton-ad families?

25. Will all humans someday be blended? Is this the direction humanity is going?

From the book:

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion. ... Raz's wife was the daughter of an Iranian-Kurdish mother and a Pakistani-American father. I couldn't wait to see their kids: they'd be walking Benetton ads (p. 141).

From today's New York Times:

Obama’s family ... [is] ... unusual in the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness. But the Benetton-ad family is less unusual than it may seem. This is the age of globalized, far-flung families.

What's with the Benetton ads? Have you seen the ads? I haven't, so somebody please enlighten me. Okay, I did it myself, so here's one Benetton ad that I found:

FYI ~ information about Benetton ads

POB ~ another discussion question

Since we seems to be having trouble discussing the book, let me throw out another question. Earlier, Marg said, "I was surprised by how quickly Hanna and Ozren fell into bed with each other." Zorro said, "She jumps in bed with Ozren on the day of their first meeting." This is what Hannah thinks:

I suppose I am a bit of a prude, about some things, anyway. I like loyalty. I mean, do what you like when you're single. Live and let live. Lay and get laid. But why bother to be married at all, if you don't want the commitment? (p. 197)

24. What do you think of Hanna's reasoning?

POB ~ discussion questions 11-23

Hanna ~ Vienna, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 91-104)

11. What do you think of Herr Doktor Doktor Werner Maria Heinich, Hanna's colleague and teacher?

12. What do you think of Frau Zweig, chief archivist at Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien?

13. What do you think of the assertion that "a charge of collaboration was a useful way for the Communists to get rid of anyone who was too intellectual, too religious, too outspoken" (p. 100)?

Feathers and a Rose ~ Vienna, 1894 ~ (pp. 105-127)

14. Herr Doktor Franz Hirschfeldt (Jewish) and his half brother Kapitan David Hirschfeldt (Christian, but with a Jewish name) are an interesting pair. Even though the Waidhofen manifesto was supposed to stop duels with Jews (p. 114), David comes to his brother to be stitched up because "it seems my Bavarian Mutti no longer provides enough pure blood to counteraact the taint of our father" (p. 115). What do you make of this strange situation?

15. Franz Hirschfeldt chooses not to visit his mistress on his way home, then becomes furious when he realizes his wife has been with a lover (pp. 117-120). What a double standard! Then, when his mistress Rosalind decides to go out for the evening after their "untender coupling" (p. 120): "He was chagrined. It was he who should decide when to end the affair, not she" (p. 121). What do you think of his thinking?

16. Herr Florien Mittl (Christian bookbinder, Franz's patient) noticed a "beam of sunlight lay like a stripe of yellow ribbon across the workbench. It hit the sad, tattered, untouched cover of the book. And then it flared on the freshly polished silver of the clasps" (p. 124). Do you think he sold the silver to pay for a "cure" for the disease that's stealing his memory?

17. The silver clasps are destined to become earrings for the doctor's mistress and another pair for his wife, his "fallen Angel" (p. 127). What do you think about that?

Hanna ~ Vienna, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 129-144)
Razmus Kanaha (Raz is chief conservation scientist at the Fogg)

18. Dana Faber (p. 135) is a hospital in Boston, an interesting thought in that Faber is the name of the German general who tried to get his hands on the haggadah. Do you think the author did that on purpose?

19. Hanna's mum paced as she made her presentation to the medical society, and she had her audience transfixed. "She loved the strut and swagger of being a top surgeon, a top woman surgeon" (p. 136). Does she deserve credit for having reached a position that was difficult for a woman to attain?

20. Hanna was impressed by the ethnicity of her postdoc friend Raz, "one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity" (p. 141): part African American, part native Hawaiian, part Japanese, part Swedish. Raz's wife was a mixture of Iranian-Kurdish-Pakistani-American. Hanna thought, "I couldn't wait to see their kids: they'd be walking Benetton ads" (p. 141). Do you think this is where we humans are headed?

Wine Stains ~ Venice, 1609 ~ (pp. 145-189)

21. Judah Aryeh (a rabbi in the Geto) said to Giovanni Domenico Vistorini (Catholic inquisitor): "Your church did not want your holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avodat ha kodesh, a holy work" (p. 156). What do you think about burning (or banning or challenging) books?

22. What did you think about the reason Vistorini sometimes allowed Jews to keep some of their books (p. 157) and especially his reason for finally signed and saving the Savajevo Haggadah (p. 189)?

23. Why would a Venetian Christian like Dona Reyna de Serena have a Jewish prayer book?

POB - Question

This is a question that is purely for my curiosity. Given how much Australian idiom is in the book, I was wondering whether or not the American version has mum spelt as mum or as mom. For a specific reference, on about page 142 (I think the page numbering varies slightly in my version) Hanna talks about going to listen to her mum's speech. In the Australian version of the book is says:

Mum's talk was humbly titled "How I Do It: Giant Aneurysms."

It's not a important question ..... but I was wondering! LOL!!

Maybe a better question is how do you find the Australian colloquialisms within the book? The author has definitely got them right...which she should given that she is Australian herself, although she has lived away from here for a very long time.

POB ~ discussion questions 1-10

Hanna ~ Sarajevo, Spring 1996 ~ (pp. 1-44)

1. We've met two main characters: Dr. Hanna Heath and Dr. Ozren Karaman (Muslim). What do you think of Hanna? What do you think of Dr. Ozren Karaman, "a thin young man in faded blue jeans" (p. 13)?

I ~ (pp. 3-13)

2. When I reached the words: "And then he handed me the book" (p. 13), I wrote this note: "Oooh, I wonder what that must have felt like, to know you are holding such a treasure!" If you click on Mary Zorro's link, you have the closest we can get here at Book Buddies to having the book in our hands: looking at it page by page. What do you think of those illustrations?

II ~ (pp. 13-25)

3. Hanna believes, "Change. That's the enemy. Books do best when temperature, humidity, the whole environment, stay the same" (p. 13). See what change has done to the actual Haggadah by looking at the UN photo Mary Zorro found. Have you ever been dismayed at what's happened to an old book you have seen? Tell us about it.

4. I love my books for what they SAY, not for their physical properties. Book collectors value a book for itself, the THING, not the words inside. I can see value in both views. Tell us what you value about books. Hanna says:

"To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history. The way I see it, my job is to make it stable enough to allow safe handling and study, repairing only where absolutely necessary. This here," I said, pointing to a page where a russett stain bloomed over the fiery Hebrew calligraphy, "I can take a microscopic sample of those fibers, and we can analyze them, and maybe learn what made that stain -- wine would be my first guess. But a full analysis might provide clues as to where the book was at the time it happened" (p. 17).

III ~ (pp. 25-33)

5. "Kunta Kinte" (p. 28) ... do you remember (or know about) Alex Haley's 1976 book Roots, which became a 12-hour TV mini-series in 1977? Could we say this novel is about the "roots" of a book?

IV ~ (pp. 33-41)

6. Hanna believes that "if something can be known, I can't stand not knowing it" (p. 41). Can you understand that feeling? What were you thinking when Hanna implored Ozren to get a second opinion on Alia's condition and he becomes angry, saying, "Not every story has a happy ending" (p. 37)?

V ~ (pp. 41-44)

7. "Bits of butterfly don't generally wind up in books. Moths do, because they come indoors, where books are kept. But butterflies are outdoor creatures" (p. 43). So how did bits of butterfly wing end up in the book?

An Insect's Wing ~ Sarajevo, 1940 ~ (pp. 45-90)

8. What did you think of Lola's adventures? Did it make sense to you when the young man told Lola, "The only true home for Jews is Eretz Israel" (p. 50)?

9. What did you think about Stela and Serif Kamal, the Albanian Muslims Lola met?

10. Why do you think the Nazis were intent on destroying Jewish books? Could something like that happen today? Before you answer, take a look at my Banned Books blog.