People of the Book

Hanna gets dinner with Raz, and they talk shop. His wife is out of town. Later, Raz suggests they go to bed together, and Hanna is appalled and brushes him off. Later, she has a sexual dream about Ozren.

Hanna wakes up to a phone call in her hotel room. It is a doctor from the ER. He tells her that her mother has been in a car accident and is in critical condition. She has a bleed in her spleen, fainted, and is now in surgery. The other woman, Delilah Sharansky, was dead on arrival. Hanna rushes to the hospital to find her mother coming out of surgery. Then, after talking to her mother for a brief period of time, Sarah Heath reveals that Delilah Sharansky was Hanna’s grandmother. She tells Hanna to go a house in Brookline to sit shiva and meet the family she has never known.

Hanna goes to house to sit shiva, meeting many relatives she never knew, but not before getting the story of her father from her sick mother. Her father was named Aaron Sharansky, and he died from a brain tumor and bleeding caused by neurosurgery. Aaron was a painter and scholar and left his estate to Delilah and Sarah to connect them after his death. Hanna feels confused and angry about the loss not only of her father, but also of his family, who wanted to stay connected to her. At the house in Brookline she thinks: “I was trying to recast myself as someone who belonged in this setting, someone half Russian Jewish. Someone who could have been going through life named Hanna Sharansky” (212).

A few days later, Hanna flies to London for her talk at the Tate. Raz leaves her a note at her hotel, apologizing for his misstep and telling her that the salt sample from the Haggadah was not actually table salt, but sea salt. Hanna ponders this as she flies over the Atlantic Ocean.