Authors and Afterwords: Two for the Price of One

Margaret Truman – A Washington Insider

By guest columnist Joan Timm

The dedication page in Murder Inside the Beltway reads as follows:

Dedicated, with love, to our mother, Margaret Truman Daniel.

For more than thirty years, she liked nothing better than to sit

at home in New York, murdering people in Washington, D.C.,

one at a time.

Clifton Truman Daniel, Harrison Gates Daniel,

Thomas Washington Daniel

Obviously, Margaret Truman passed away before this work was finally published in 2008. She was (and is) too often overlooked as a writer, but she should not be. She authored nine historic accounts which everyone interested in an inside look at our nation’s past should at least peruse. In addition to biographies of her father and mother, there are First Ladies, Souvenir, Women of Courage, Where the Buck Stops, The President’s House and more. All are worthy of attention.

As the dedication quoted above indicates, she also wrote with great élan her Capital Crime Series, murder mysteries too numerous to mention by name here, some 24 in all. A great deal of information is subtlety packed into these scenarios. For example, I learned that Ford’s Theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot has in fact been replaced, after the original was destroyed. The new theater is true to the old down to the last detail.

Truman’s range is impressive. She does not limit herself to one investigator. Although her primary sleuth is a Washington insider lawyer-turned-professor named Mackenzie Smith, other detectives include an alcoholic police veteran, an up-and-coming Hispanic woman on the staff of the Metropolitan District Police and others. Her victims include a former mafia don in Washington to testify before a Senate investigating committee, a young arts management apprentice at Ford’s Theater, a CIA agent accused of murdering his superior, just to name a few. Her characters vary from elected officials to Presidential and Senatorial aides, from ego serving reporters to power crazed candidates whose ethics are questionable to say the least. Neither are Truman’s plots limited to Washington, D.C. but include an unexpected array of topics and places. For example, a lost painting by the 16th and 17th century Italian master, Michelangelo Caravaggio, leads the reader to Italy. A murder in Havana transports the reader to Cuba. No place is too sacred to be the scene of a crime:  the White House, the Library of Congress, even the National Cathedral. As Truman herself asserted in the preface to Murder at the Washington Tribune, all of the locations, the streets, the neighborhoods, the restaurants, are real with one notable exception. There is no Washington Tribune. It did not seem to the author to be a good idea to place a scandal inside The Washington Post! Reality television? Reporting of political chicanery on CNN? Confessions of infidelity on the part of highly placed officials? Truman’s reports of political evasiveness, congressional “friendships” with women from escort services, and fabrication of news are all part of her characters’ repertoire. This reviewer’s reaction to these nefarious shenanigans was a wry smile. Thoughts such as “Why does this not surprise me?” or “Uh-huh” or “Wasn’t there a Presidential hopeful named Gary Hart?” came to my mind.

Summer reading? Perhaps, but Truman’s historical accounts and her Capital Crimes Series make for a good read in summer, winter, spring, or fall. Her explorations behind the scenes of life among the nation’s “elite” are witty, disturbing, thought provoking and still timely. If anyone was ever in a situation with access to knowledge of such doings, Margaret Truman certainly was.

Book Club Beloveds – Geraldine Brooks and The People of the Book

By Henry C. Timm

The phrase “people of the book” arises from the shared traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is used in the Qur’an to describe all those people who have recognized the God of Abraham as the one true God up until and including the appearance of Mohammad. In Judaism, the term is more likely used in reference specifically to Jews, to the Torah and to Jewish law. It is a peculiarity of the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah that the term may be applied in both senses and Geraldine Brooks, in her ingenious and mostly fictional reconstruction of that history uses it so.

My affection for this book begins with the episodes that take place in Boston and Cambridge. Brooks herself lived there in 2006 as a result of receiving a fellowship to attend the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She and her family now live part of the year on Martha’s Vineyard and part of the year in Sidney, Australia. Although I have not experienced the latter, I know well that special ambience that the salt air carries with it in Boston, along with the voices that make Boston unique. I am equally affected by her references to Cambridge, the way Harvard Square feels and the elegance of the Charles River, with views across it in both directions. But there are more important and exotic settings in the story of the Haggadah and Brooks has connected them all in her well-imagined history.

Here is what we know from the manuscript itself.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript opening with 34 illustrations followed by the traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which informs the Passover Seder.

It originated in Barcelona circa 1350.

It is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world.

It is believed to have been taken out of Spain when the Spanish Jews were expelled in 1492.

Marginal notes testify to the fact that it was in Italy in the 1500s.

A man by the name of Joseph Kohen sold it to the National Museum in Sarajevo in 1894.

The museum’s chief librarian, Dervis Korkut risked his life to hide the manuscript from the Nazis in World War II. He smuggled it out of Sarajevo and turned it over to a Muslim cleric in Zenec who hid it away until the war was over.

The manuscript miraculously survived the Bosnian War in 1992. It was discovered in the rubble on the floor of the library by Police Detective Fahrudin Cebo; was placed in a bank vault during the siege of Sarajevo and then, to quell rumors that the book had been sold to buy munitions, it was presented to the Jewish Community in Sarajevo by the President of Bosnia at a community Seder in 1995. In 2001 the Haggadah was conserved through funds raised by the UN and the Jewish Community on Bosnia. It has been on display at the National Museum since December of 2002.

Geraldine Brooks takes account of all this history in her appealing book, filling in around these details with beautifully construed and constructed fictional characters. She frames the story of the Haggadah in the voice of its fictional conservator, one Hannah Heath. Her story, along with those of the people she invents in the past, extends the fugal theme that drives the novel, i.e. the fusion of identity, character and action for good or ill. If there is a motto for her book, it may well be a line one of the characters quotes from a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins:  What I do is me, for that I came. In creating a fiction that takes account of the known and unknown details of the long life of the Sarajevo Haggadah, Brooks has celebrated the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, known and unknown, who have carried that beautiful little book in their hands and in their hearts towards safety. If the people of the book can accomplish such a small miracle so far, think what we could do with the world.