Lit Talk: Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is a true woman of the world. She was born and raised in Australia, but completed her Master’s in journalism at Columbia University and married her husband Tony Horwitz in France, during which period she converted to Judaism. As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in the Middle East.

Her international experiences are tangible in the diversity of her books: The Nine Parts of Desire deals with her work among Muslim women in the Middle East; Year of Wonders centers on a plague outbreak in 17th-century Puritan England; Pulitzer Prize-winning March tells the story of the absent father of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters; People of the Book chronicles the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest versions in Europe of the traditional Passover service text. Below is an excerpt from an interview on her website about People of the Book:

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Interviewer: Your previous two novels are set during Europe’s plague years and the American Civil War. Now, you’ve created an epic story about art and religious persecution. What is it that draws you to a particular subject? Or a particular historical era?

Geraldine: I love to find stories from the past where we can know something, but not everything; where there is enough of a historical record to have left us with an intriguing factual scaffolding, but where there are also enough unknowable voids in that record to allow room for imagination to work.

Interviewer: What do you think it is about the real Sarajevo Haggadah that has allowed it to survive the centuries?

Geraldine: It’s a fascinating question: why did this little book always find its protectors, when so many others did not? It is interesting to me that the book was created in a period—convivencia Spain—when diversity was tolerated, even somewhat celebrated, and that it found its way centuries later to a similar place, Sarajevo. So even when hateful forces arose in those societies and crushed the spirit of multi-ethnic, interfaith acceptance, there were those individuals who saw what was happening and acted to stop it in any way they could.

Interviewer: Were you already working on People of the Book when March won the Pulitzer Prize? How does winning such a prestigious award affect your writing?

Geraldine: I was working on People of the Book even before I started to write March. I’d been struggling quite a bit with the World War II story: it’s such a picked-over period and I was looking for a backwater of the war that wouldn’t perhaps feel so familiar to readers. That search was leading to a lot of dead ends when I suddenly got the idea for March and it was so clear to me how to write that book that I just did it.

The Pulitzer Surprise, as my then-nine-year-old son so accurately dubbed it, affected my writing only in that it interrupted it for a while by drawing renewed attention to March. But after a few weeks of pleasant distraction I was back at my desk, alone in a room, simply doing what I’ve always done, which is trying to write as best I can, day after day.
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The full interview is available here, and Geraldine Brooks will be at the following sites this summer:

Sunday, August 2 (Time TBA)
Martha's Vineyard Book Festival
520 South RoadChilmark, Mass. 02535

202.645.9484

Thursday, August 13 at 7:00 p.m.
Martha’s Vineyard Museum
59 School St.Edgartown, Mass. 02539

508.627.4441

--Emmaline Silverman

Photo by Randi Baird/Viking Penguin Publicity