Arts and Culture Videos

Nancy's guest is Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks.  Brooks, who won the Pulitzer for her novel March, has based her new novel, People of the Book, on the real-life adventures of a 14th century Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah.  The manuscript, which surfaced in 1894, is a richly illuminated version of the narrative Jews around the world use at their Passover tables to tell the story of the Exodus. It caused uproar among art historians who had long believed that the Third Commandment had precluded the use of figurative art by medieval Jews.  The story moves from Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480.