People of the Book

Hanna returns to Sarajevo late at night. The next day she goes to the museum to look at the exhibit, in a state-of-the-art temperature-controlled room, where the Haggadah would be kept. The room is immaculate, with perfect light and a lovely assortment of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim manuscripts and artworks to pair with the multi-cultural Haggadah. But as Hanna looks at the Haggadah’s pages, she stops in her tracks. The manuscript is not right. She runs to Ozren’s office and discovers both a pale-looking and disheveled Ozren and her mentor, Werner, sitting at his desk. Hanna reveals that the parchment is wrong on the Haggadah in the case, revealing that someone may have stolen the original and replaced it with a perfect fake. Hanna immediately suspects Amitai, who is an ex-commando for the Israeli military and who has incentive to steal the book. Ozren, Werner, and Hanna inspect each page of the manuscript, but Ozren and Werner claim to see none of the signs that Hana sees. Hanna wants to sound the alarm, but Ozren protests, saying, “You will be sowing inter-communal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal” (326).