Included on this page:

Biography of Geraldine Brooks; Excerpt from a conversation with Brooks; Pages from the Sarajevo Haggadah; A page from a Book of Hours;  Selections from " A Better Place" by Joan Acocella; A review of David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215.

"The Writing Life," an essay by Geraldine Brooks; and "Perpetual Motion," by Maria Arana, an essay about Geraldine Brooks.

Biography

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.

In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March, and her novel Year of Wonders is an international bestseller. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.

Brooks married author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-loup, France, in 1984. They have one child and three dogs, and divide their time between homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia.

For more information, see The Washington Post: “Plucky Charms ” by Bob Thompson and “The Writing Life,” an essay by Brooks.

From A Conversation With Geraldine Brooks" by David B. Green http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=947915

You wrote recently in The New Yorker about the real history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. Did you consider writing a non-fiction book on the subject, or have you just decided that historical fiction is the way to tell the stories you want to tell? There is actually very little known for sure about the Haggadah. I had to really scramble to cobble together the facts of what befell the book in the past century − and despite my efforts, journeys and many interviews, there are still gaps in that record. Everything else − all four or five hundred years of it − is completely shrouded in uncertainty. We know nothing for sure about the artist, the scribe, the circumstances of the book's creation; how it got out of Spain, why it was submitted to the Catholic censor in Venice, and on and on. Imagination was the only way to fill the void. Right now I'm enjoying mining these kinds of fictional seams and am inclined to keep doing so for as long as I can get away with it. Have you been thinking about this book since your time as a reporter in Sarajevo, or where did the idea come from, and how long did the reporting and research take? Yes, the story took root in my imagination back in the mid 1990s, long before I knew I was destined to become a novelist. I started working on it in 2001, then set it aside for a couple of years because I was getting gnarled up in the more contemporary parts of the narrative. The research was driven by the story, so when I returned to it, in 2005 after finishing "March," I worked on the writing and the delving simultaneously. Do you have a favorite character in the novel, aside, say, from the contemporary narrator? I'm very fond of Judah Aryeh, who is based on Rabbi Leon Modena, who lived in Venice in the 17th century. Brilliant and flawed - my kind of guy. Was there a particular inspiration for the relationship between Hanna Heath and her mother, the super-ambitious and super-accomplished neurosurgeon Dr. Sarah Heath? And do you have any regrets about making Sarah so unsympathetic? I wanted to explore a relationship very different - in fact, the polar opposite - of my own. My mother has always been my best friend. So I wanted to imagine what it would be like if that were not the case. I think there is blame on both sides - mother's and daughter's - for the sourness of their relationship. Sarah's bad, but not all bad. Ostensibly, you've written three novels about three different subjects. But am I right in thinking there are certain themes - perhaps the way people behave when they are subjected to the most difficult conditions and pressures - that particularly interest you and make their way into all your writing? Yes, that's true. I am drawn to the question: Who are we in catastrophe? Who is destined to become his best self, who her worst? If there's any group abused and mistreated more than Jews in "People of the Book," it's women. More than a decade after you wrote "Nine Parts of Desire," do you discern a change in the status of women in the Muslim world, and in which direction? For the worse, alas. In Saudi Arabia there was a tremendous backlash after the enforced opening to the world of the first Gulf War. The very small windows through which women negotiated their lives slammed shut. And because the Saudis were exporting their airless vision of Islam throughout the world, those attitudes - that women have no role in public life - penetrated places where women had been vibrant members of their society. You only have to look as far as Gaza, actually; a small thing, like the beautiful traditional, embroidered Palestinian dress with fine white headscarf has been deemed insufficiently "Islamic," and is rarely seen on the streets there any more. Have you had much evidence of that book making it into the hands of readers in the Arab world? Did anyone translate it? The Iranians translated sections of it into Farsi, published it in the newspaper and had quite a lively public debate about it. I don't know of any Arabic translations, but it doesn't really contain anything that would be news to Arab women. I meant it for a Western audience - people like myself who are curious but who didn't have the opportunities I had to get to know so many fascinating women leading such different lives. You are understandably moved by several periods, or at least instances, when Jews and Muslims cooperated and even helped one another, not just during the Convivencia period in Spain, but also in more recent times. Overall, though, with all of the various hats you have worn, do you see reason for believing that there will be any reconciliation in the future, in our little corner of the Middle East, or more generally? I always promised myself I wouldn't comment on the Middle East if I wasn't living there, smelling the air, pounding the pavement. I hate the Washington blowhards who do that - talk about Iran, for instance, when they haven't set foot on Persian soil in 20 years. But when I was spending a lot of time in Israel, it always seemed to me that Israelis and Palestinians had more in common than most people on either side ever wanted to acknowledge. The future will be better than the past if moderate voices can rise above the angry clamor of the extremists. Easier said than done, I know ... When do you think you might write that Australian novel you've thought so much about? I'm not sure. I'm kind of pinned down in the U.S. now, because my son has just entered junior high, so we can't oscillate between here and Australia the way we did during his elementary school years. So maybe when he goes off to college I'll be able to get back there and get stuck into something. It's well-known that you are a convert to Judaism. Can you tell me something about the circumstances of your conversion, and - though I wouldn't want to get you in trouble with the beit din that converted you - with the way you practice your Judaism today? Do you think you could have written "People of the Book" if you hadn't been through the process? My dad served in Palestine in World War II and, as a committed socialist, got swept up in the romance of the young kibbutz movement. He was a passionate lefty Zionist all his life. So from an early age, I caught his fascination and had two Israeli penpals for many years - one Arab, one Jewish. When I fell in love with a Jew, I didn't want to be the end of the line for his heritage. I wanted to be able to pass it on to our kids. I am very lucky to belong to a terrific Reconstructionist community with a learned rabbi, Caryn Broitman, who inspires me. Still, Judaism to me is more about history than faith, and I have been fascinated by the whipsaw of Jewish history since I was in junior high. So I think I would have been attracted to this story even if I'd never met a man named Tony Horwitz.

Pages from the Sarajevo Haggadah:

A Page from A Book Of Hours

From the large number still surviving, we know that the Book of Hours was the most popular book of the Middle Ages. Books of Hours were produced throughout Europe, but were especially popular in France and Flanders. These manuscripts were modelled on the Breviary used by the clergy, but in a shortened form and were used by the laity for their daily devotions. The core of the Book of Hours is the Hours of the Virgin divided into eight parts to be said at different times or hours of the day. The eight "hours" of prayer are matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, vespers and compline. Several other prayers and texts accompany the Hours of the Virgin.

Books of Hours are often beautifully decorated with full page miniatures, half or three quarter page miniatures, elaborate initials, borders or line fillers. And, being manuscripts, they are written by hand in brown or black ink, with red or gold used to highlight important parts. 

http://vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/UPitthoursms/

Livre d’heures d”Etienne Chevalier (1450-60)

 (selections from ) A BETTER PLACE by Joan Acocella A review of: David Levering Lewis’s “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215” from The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

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In any case, however much Muhammad’s immediate successors may have struggled with their souls, they also, in the eighty-some years following his death, conquered Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Anatolia, Iraq, and Persia. By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslim forces stood at the northwest corner of Africa. There, only the Strait of Gibraltar, nine miles wide, separated them from the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia at that time was ruled by the Visigoths, a Christian people who did their best to wipe out other religions within their territory—Judaism, for example. There is some evidence that the Iberian Jews invited the Muslims to invade. In 711, they did so. The state that they established in Iberia, and maintained for almost four centuries, is the subject of David Levering Lewis’s “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215” (Norton; $29.95).

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The Muslims took most of Spain in a little over three years. The Visigoths had more men, but the Arabs were very skillful warriors, seeming to dance in front of the enemy, attacking, retreating, attacking again. Here and elsewhere, Lewis appears to see them as clever underdogs, David to Goliath, Muhammad Ali to George Foreman. He inventories the great sacks of gold and silver and precious stones that, together with vast numbers of slaves and young women (harem-bound), they sent back to their caliph in Damascus, the capital of the empire. Included in the shipments were the heads, pickled in brine, that they had removed from Visigoth grandees. In 714, they were just short of the Pyrenees, the northern border of Iberia. The peninsula was now theirs. They renamed it Al Andalus.

As news of the conquest spread, Arabs from the East streamed into Iberia, and they brought with them the conflicts brewing among them—above all, a nasty feud between northern and southern Arabs. The first twenty-two emirs (governors) of Al Andalus had an average reign of two years apiece. Stability, or as much of it as Muslim Spain ever had, began with the reign of Abd al-Rahman I, a Syrian-born prince who took over in 756 and managed to stay in power until his death, thirty-two years later. Rahman is the hero of “God’s Crucible.” Lewis loves him, and calls him by his sobriquet, the Falcon. Rahman was a firm ruler—he had taken his throne by force—but he was also a man of the people. Lewis describes him strolling about the capital city, Córdoba, in a white djellabah, without bodyguards, and preaching at Friday services in the mosque. Raised in a palace, he was an arts lover. It was he who built the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the most spectacular extant example of Muslim Spain’s architectural achievements. He also botanized, and imported to Spain its first date palms, its first lemons, limes, and grapefruit, as well as almonds, apricots, saffron, and henna. This of course was good for trade, which flourished during his time.

Accordingly, so did Spain’s cities, led by Córdoba, which under Rahman had an estimated population of about a hundred thousand. Lewis describes the metropolis that the emir left to his successors: “The qasr”—palace—“was new, completed just as the Falcon ordered the foundations laid for the Friday (Great) Mosque. Not many steps away were the public baths. Nearby was the central market, where basic commodities of bread, vegetables, fruit, oil, and lamb at regulated prices were upstaged by Persian carpets, Damascus metalware, China silks, fine leather and jewelry, slaves, and much else supplied on demand by the Muslim world economy. . . . The capital’s streets, following no particular pattern from the long wall beside the gray Guadalquivir River, linked neighborhoods where Jews, Berbers, Catholics and Orthodox, Arabs and muwalladun”—non-Arab converts to Islam—“lived as though in their own separate worlds. Sephardic apothecaries, Visigoth blacksmiths, and Greek surgeons offered services in these long, narrow arteries.” Orange and lemon trees in the public gardens perfumed the air. Outside the city, “the long Guadalquivir plain, abundantly irrigated by waterwheels, was carpeted with cereal plantations of wheat, rye, and barley, and olive trees forever.” You want to move there.

Rahman was the founder of Muslim Spain’s famous convivencia. Translated literally, the word means “living together,” in spite of differences, and this idea is the burning center of “God’s Crucible.” I think it is the reason that Lewis chose to write about Muslim Spain. He is not an Arabist. He is best known for a two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1993 and 2000), which won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for each volume. But that book, if it is not about Arabs, is about racial justice, and it is for the furtherance of such justice that Lewis so admires Rahman. Nevertheless, as he points out, the convivencia had its limits. It was not just a humane policy—an act of obedience to the Koran (“There shall be no compulsion in religion”) and a way of being civilized—but also a matter of Realpolitik. Iberia was a ragbag of religious and ethnic groups. Tolerance, what we would now call multiculturalism, was more likely to hold them together than forced conversion. Furthermore, the convivencia never involved complete equality. In the early years, a number of restrictions were placed on Jews and Christians. They had to wear identification badges. They could not proselytize, and they were required to pray quietly. Their houses could not be taller than Muslims’ houses. Most important, they had to pay a heavy tax, called the jizya. In time, many of these rules (not including the tax) fell away. Jews, especially, were allowed to enter public service, as scribes, clerks, advisers. They taught the Muslims how to run a government, Lewis writes. The golden age of Al Andalus, he says, was also the golden age of Sefarad, the Sephardic Jews. But even those who did not have brilliant careers no doubt found badges and taxes preferable to forced conversion or death. Eventually, many Jews and Christians did convert—probably, in many cases, to avoid the tax. At the end of the eighth century, the vast majority of people in Iberia were Christians. Two hundred years later, the majority were Muslims.

The Muslims never ruled all of Iberia. Certain regions, particularly in the north, remained independent, or were only loosely allied with the emirate, and they repeatedly rebelled. Then there was the strife within the Muslim populace. Christians and Jews were not the only ones who received unequal treatment—any non-Arab did. That included the descendants of the North African Berbers whom the Arabs had added to their empire at the beginning of the eighth century and who came with them to Spain. The Iberian Berbers were Muslims, and the emirate’s best warriors. (Tariq ibn Zayid, who led the invasion of Iberia, was a Berber, and so was his cavalry.) They also outnumbered the Arabs in Spain. Therefore, they resented their second-class status. For much of the history of Al Andalus, the emirs had to deal with Berber revolts. Another reason the Iberian Arabs had to go back to war was that the conversions to Islam, in freeing people from the jizya, were depleting the treasury. The emirs had to find more infidels to tax. Finally, there was the command of jihad. The Arabs had never meant to stop at the Pyrenees, and, in 732, only twenty-one years after they entered Iberia, they scaled the great mountains and went down the other side.

The kingdom they were invading was Frankland—roughly, France, Belgium, and parts of western Germany—under the rule of Charles the Hammer, or, in French, Charles Martel. The Muslims lost some engagements and won others, but because of a Berber revolt at home they were soon forced to withdraw.

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Al Andalus died more slowly. The Vikings made no headway there; Muslim Spain was attacked, as usual, by its own—the Iberian Berbers, the Christian territories of the north—and by North African Berbers who came in as reinforcements and then seized power. These Africans brought with them a form of Islam far more strict and exclusionary than Iberia had known before. Between that and a cycle of rebellions and reprisals, convivencia came to be viewed as a form of laxity. In this late period, the armies were not headed by Arabs. Prosperity had softened the Arab élite. They liked the good life; they had little taste for war, where you couldn’t get a decent meal or a bath. (The Iberian Muslims felt strongly about personal hygiene. They had toothpaste and underarm deodorant.) So they stayed home, and sent Berbers, Africans, and slaves to fight their wars—less wisely, and more brutally, than they would have done. Here, Lewis sounds a tragic note: the more civilized a people, the more vulnerable.

Year by year, the good life vanished. Book burnings began, together with pogroms. Revolts and reprisals were conducted in an ecstasy of violence. When Córdoba, under the emir Muhammad II, was invaded by a rival claimant to the throne, the latter’s Berber army raped the women, sacked the city, and knocked down its splendid buildings, including Rahman’s palace. (They spared the Great Mosque.) Twenty years later, the Iberian caliphate was dissolved, and the peninsula was divided among taifas, or petty kings, who ruled with a new cruelty. At this point, the Reconquista—the recapturing of Spain by the Christians—began in earnest. Toledo fell to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, a Catholic king, in 1085. Four more centuries passed before the expulsion of the last emir from Granada, in 1492, but Lewis gets through them fast. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

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By the twelfth century, though, such thought was dangerous in Spain. (Averroës’s books were burned; some were lost permanently.) It was more dangerous on the part of Jews, like Maimonides. He died in exile, bitterly reproaching his homeland for its abandonment of liberal ideas. (Here one thinks of the European Jews of the nineteen-thirties.) With the deaths of those two men, the lights go out in “God’s Crucible.”

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The Writing Life by Geraldine Brooks

The bookshelves of my Australian childhood were garrisoned by foreign troops, filled with stories by faraway English people who wrote of things I couldn't see or touch or know: A.A. Milne, Enid Blyton, C.S. Lewis; The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Snow Goose. These were good books, but they came between me and my country. Australia had been an independent nation since 1901, but in the 1960s, my imagination was still a British colony.

The characters in my childhood books built their tree houses in reddening rowan trees; they did not scramble up scribbly gums. I read names of flowers I had never seen, but I didn't know what to call the tiny chrome-yellow blooms that flecked the bushland around my grandmother's house. My mind lived in a cold, Anglican place while my body lived in a hot, Roman Catholic one. Once, at an aunt's burial, I remember shifting my weight from foot to foot as the burning red clay melted the soles of my shoes, and being struck by the massive irrelevance to Australian experience of an expression like “cold as the grave.”

The real world of my 1960s Sydney childhood—the sweaty, salt-tanged summer days when the smell of distant bush fires mingled with the car exhaust of suburban Sydney—was not set down between any hard covers, at least none that made it to my bedtime-story hour. None of my tartan-skirted heroines played, as I did, amid the rich stink of Parramatta River mangroves. As I felt the warm, silky mud rising between my toes, I somehow knew that those girls, in their lisle stockings and patent-leather shoes, would have been disgusted.

Because I did not read of my own world, it took me a very long time to learn how much I loved it. There was, in post-World War II Australia, a lingering sense of inferiority, fed by the man who led the country, an Anglophile prime minister, Robert Menzies, who lived for his trips to Buckingham Palace and wrote in his journal on the way home that “a sick feeling of repugnance grows in me as I near Australia.”

When I went to college, it was to the Gothic-towered University of Sydney, an institution that signaled its aim of aping Oxford and Cambridge with a Latin motto that roughly translated as “Same Place, Different Skies”; its English department didn’t establish a chair of Australian literature until the 1960s. When I studied the novels of our Nobel Prize winner, Patrick White, I closed his books dismayed by his patrician contempt for ordinary, suburban Australians.

For most Australians of my generation, a long adventure overseas was a rite of passage. Most of my friends had gone to England, but I was tired of feeling like a colonial, and so I chose the United States instead. I got a job with the Wall Street Journal, and way led on to way, until I found myself in a tiny village in Virginia, with a child who asks for “candy” and “cookies” instead of lollies and biscuits. I read to him about Hiawatha and Natty Bumppo. But I also read him the English classics of my childhood, for the risk here is that he will grow up believing that A A Milne’s most British of bears speaks with a Disneyfied American accent. His shelves also contain a raft of Australian children's books. For Australia changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the election of reformist, arts-oriented government led to a surge in national pride and creativity. Nowadays there are plenty of books whose roots delve deep into Australia's dry red soil.

Not long after my son was born, I sat down to try to write my first novel. It was to have been set in Tasmania, amid the wild temperate rain forests of Australia’s southernmost state. Instead, I found myself writing about Derbyshire. The fictional voices in my head were English voices, and they kept shouting the Australians down. There was a story that had intrigued me for years, of a village that voluntarily quarantined itself to stop the spread of bubonic plague. It was this tale, rather than the Australian one, that most wanted to be told. When I gave in to the impulse and started to write, it came to me so much more readily than the Tasmanian story. The bright shards of Dryden and Pepys, the vast swathes of Shakespeare lodged in my memory, made it easy to hear the cadences, the rhythms, to know the meanings of archaic words without even looking them up.

The history, the noises of revolution, Civil War and Restoration —I knew that, too, much better than I knew the details of my own country’s past. And as the book took shape under my hands, I was, like a sufferer from literary Stockholm syndrome, suddenly and profoundly grateful to my cultural captors.

One day, I hope to write an Australian novel. But I now know I will have to work for it. Many years ago, I spent a week rafting Tasmania’s Franklin River, which runs wild and swift from its mountain source until it joins the wide Gordon for a brief run to the sea. We were striking camp near the end of the journey when one of our guides came out of the dark rain forest with a half-dozen leaves in his hand. “I thought you might like to know what’s growing here,” he said, turning over the glossy spear of native laurel, a fern-like frond of Huon pine, the serrated leaf of celery top, the fragrant leatherwood. After that, the trees weren’t just “bush” any more—I knew each as an individual and so could see it clearly. The guide, Geoffrey Lea, seemed as magical as Adam to me that day, naming creation. He and I had grown up differently: he had grown up as an Australian.

I still have the leaves that Geoff picked long ago by the Franklin, sere and sapless now, pressed in the pages of my dictionary. I keep them there so that I will see them almost every day. They remind me that if I ever want to write of my own country, I will have to learn it, like a foreigner, like a migrant, leaf by leaf, from seed to blossom to bough.

Geraldine Brooks

The Washington Post
Copyright 2001, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Perpetual Motion by Marie Arana

A serious writer, wrote W. H. Auden, “is of two kinds. One is the kind who spends most of his life preparing to produce a masterpiece. . . . The other kind is engaged in perpetual endeavors. The moment such an artist learns to do something, he stops and tries to do something else, something new.” That second kind of writer is Geraldine Brooks, author of three critically acclaimed books, each belonging to a distinct genre, each a radical departure from the last.

Her first was Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden Life of Islamic Women (1995), written while she was still a Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal—a probing, well-reported, back-room view of Islamic life, as seen from behind the chador. The second was Foreign Correspondence (1998), a highly evocative memoir of Australian girlhood in which Brooks tracked down her old pen-pals—an Arab boy, an Israeli Jew, a French country girl, and a young anorexic from Maplewood, N.J.—to say some very lucid things about the tug of adventure and the grit of real life. Her most recent publication is a historical novel set in plague-ridden, seventeenth century England, Year of Wonders (2001), praised on these pages as “sophisticated and utterly absorbing.” From foreign correspondent to memoirist to storyteller, Brooks is clearly a writer with protean abilities—a tireless quester for “something new.”

Her father was an American big-band singer with a scandalous romantic past; the calumny grew to such a proportion that he eventually was forced to put himself on the other side of the globe. When his agent advised him to change his name, he looked out a window, saw a sign for “Brooks Brothers,” and reinvented himself entirely. He served in the Australian army in World War II. After the war, he married for the fourth time, had two baby girls, and settled down to a quiet life as a proofreader for a Sydney newspaper.

A sickly child, Brooks was partly homeschooled by her mother, a vivacious former radio announcer who acted out Shakespeare and taught the girl to read and write as she puttered about the garden. But it was the smell of ink—“that black mist hanging in the air” when the eight-year-old visited her father at the paper— that captured her imagination. “He reached out to the conveyor, picked up the freshly printed paper, and handed it to me. I’ll never forget the feel of it—warm in my hand.”

She was determined to become a reporter, “a choice very much at odds with my excruciating shyness.” Nevertheless, she managed to graduate in journalism from the University of Sydney, win a scholarship to the Columbia School of Journalism, meet her husband, Tony Horwitz (author of Confederates in the Attic), get hired by the Wall Street Journal in 1983, and shortly thereafter be sent to Cairo to cover the Middle East. For many years, she wrote about that volatile region as well as about Bosnia, Somalia and Eritrea. Reporting on the Shell Oil scandals in Nigeria in 1994, she was arrested and thrown in prison. “Lying there on the concrete floor, I decided that if I ever got out, the first thing I would do was get pregnant.” One son, seven years, and three books later, she is at work on a novel that straddles three continents and six centuries—as Auden might say, still “engaged in perpetual endeavors.”