The Storyteller

I was totally absorbed by this extraordinary and moving novel.
Twenty-five-year-old Sage Singer lives in the small town of Westerbrook, New Hampshire. A few years before the story begins, Sage and her mother were in a terrible car accident. Sage was driving. Her mother was killed in the crash, and Sage was left with a large scar across her cheek. She also has deep emotional wounds. They serve as a constant reminder that she is responsible for her mother’s death. She believes that her sisters, Pepper and Saffron, blame her for their Mom’s demise, so she actively avoids contact with them.Sage is extremely self-conscious about her disfigurement and has the habit of letting her hair fall, across her face to hide it. Her self-esteem is mega low and her feelings of guilt are mega-high. A reclusive, Sage works bakers’ hours, at night, to avoid people. She makes her livelihood as a master baker at “Our Daily Bread,” a shop owned by an ex-nun who is Sage’s friend – one of the few friends she has. And what a wonderful master baker she is!! She has the magic touch! She inherits her skill and zeal for baking from Minka, her Jewish grandmother whom she calls Nana. Nana Minka once said, “You know what I think? I think that even when I do not remember my own name anymore, I will still know how to make this challah. My father,” (Sage’s great grandfather, was a master baker in Lodz, Poland), made sure of it. He used to quiz me – when I walked into our apartment after school, when I was studying with a friend, when we were strolling together in the city center. Minka, he’d say, ‘how much sugar? How many eggs? He’d ask what temperature the water should be, but that was a trick question. My father, he would have been happy to know his challah is in good hands.” She also told Sage, “Your Poppa couldn’t boil water, much less a bagel. To make bread you have to have a gift, like my father did. Like you do.” When Sage asks about her great grandparents, Nana Minka dismisses her questions and says they died a long time ago. And she always changes the subject. Minka had been in a Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz, and had numbers tattooed on her arm. Many Holocaust survivors had their tattoos removed surgically. Minka didn’t remove hers. “She said that seeing it every morning reminds her that she won.” Minka’s Jewish parents did not survive the camps. Because of her Nana’s silence, Sage knows little of her story or abut the Holocaust in general, except for what she learns in school.Sage recently started to attend a grief group, where she meets an elderly man named Josef Weber. Josef, who immigrated to the United States from Germany many years before, is well known throughout the little town for being a kind and generous person. He was a well liked German teacher at the high school, as well as a baseball coach, and is seen by many in their town as a model citizen. Josef and Sage become quite friendly and he drops by “Our Daily Bread” frequently to talk with her. They also meet to talk outside the bakery.Then one day Weber tells her a dark secret, and he harbors many dark secrets, about his past. He asks Ana to do an unthinkable favor for him.It is very hard to write a review for “The Storyteller,” without including spoilers. So I think, in this case, less is more. Let it suffice to say that I was totally absorbed and very much moved by the storyline and well developed characters. This may not be a book for everyone as it deals graphically with the Holocaust. But I learned much by reading this novel & think it is one of Jodi Picoults’s best books.JANA

The Holocaust: a survivor and a German SS officer
5+ stars!Deeply moving, poignant story that brings the horror of the Holocaust to life. I’ve read Sophie’s Choice, and this is just as powerful.Ms. Picoult is a masterful writer. Her book delves into the lives of three people: Sage Singer, a reclusive young woman from a Jewish family; Josef Weber, a beloved 95-year-old member of the local community; and Minka, Sage’s Polish grandmother. The characters live in New Hampshire in the present (or perhaps 2013, the date of publication), although the backstories are in Poland and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.Sage bears both facial and emotional scars, and she hides from the world as much as possible, working overnight at a bakery making bread. She also conducts an illicit affair with a married mortician. She has been attending a weekly grief support group for the three years following her mother’s death, and this is where she meets Josef, who also comes to her bakery.Sage and Josef develop a friendship, but then he shares with her alone that he was part of the notorious German SS that murdered thousands of Jews. The memories are torturous, and he wishes to die, believing his longevity to be a curse rather than a blessing. Having attempted suicide unsuccessfully, he asks Sage to kill him. But before she does, he begs her, as a Jewish woman, to listen to his story, and then to forgive him. Obviously, this is a BIG ask.Josef recounts the path that led him to become such a monster, starting as a teenager joining Hitler’s youth program with his younger brother, Franz. They became conditioned to obey blindly and to resent all Jews, who were perceived as being universally affluent while true Germans like Josef’s family suffered in poverty. In gradual steps, Josef came to consider Jews as less than human and to treat them as such, making it possible first to damage their property, then to eject them from their homes and into government-created ghettos, then to ship them into prison camps, and finally to kill them en masse without guilt.Although Minka has never spoken of her experience, Sage has seen the number tattooed on her grandmother’s arm indicating that she was incarcerated during WWII. Josef’s confession leads Sage to seek out Minka’s life story, and it’s a chilling one. As a girl, Minka dreamed of becoming a famous writer. During the war, she became a kind of Shahrazad, crafting a tale that didn’t end (it’s interspersed within this book in italics), which gave her fellow captives a reason to live another day.The more Sage learns about what happened, the more conflicted she feels. The Josef she knows is a well-respected, soft-spoken, sweet old man who shares his bakery bread with his little dachshund. The man Sage comes to understand he was in his youth deserves no forgiveness, and he deserves to die. Will she kill him or won’t she? Will she forgive him or won’t she?The final pages reveal a jaw-dropper of a twist.There are additional storylines for other characters here that aren’t well developed – the grief support group seems to be MIA when Josef and Sage could use help, the daytime bakery worker speaks only in Haiku (?? why ??), and there’s a strange episode at the bakery where a loaf of bread cut in half reveals the face of Jesus on both halves, arousing media attention (again, ?? why ??). It’s also not clear why Sage is virtually estranged from her two sisters.However, I have to give 5+ stars to any book as beautifully written and moving as this one.

Excellent book! Interest insight into the world of WWII and the camps and life after the camps.

The story takes place in Westerbrook, New Hampshire, where a grief support group is taking place in the Episcopal Church.Sage Singer, a baker of breads and pastries, is attending the group meeting. She has lost her mother. She feels alone and has bad memories. Sage works at night at a bakery named Our Daily Bread and is owned by Mary DeAngelis. Mary, in her previous life was Sister Mary Robert. Sage’s parents are deceased, but she has two sisters named Pepper and Saffran, who she is not close to and a grandmother named Minka. Sage has a scar on her face, which she thinks is disfiguring, and that is why she works at night when no one can see her. During the day, she stays at home. She is very self-conscience about her scar. She keeps that a secret. She is Jewish, but not a practicing Jew and tries hard to hide that she is Jewish, so that she could fit in. However, Grandmother Minka is a survivor of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. She never speaks to Sage about her time in Poland during World War II. Minka always wears a sweater to hide the numbers on her arm.Josef Weber, an elderly man is in Sage’s grief support group. His beloved wife Marta had died. He is very well respected in the community. Josef strikes up a conversation with Sage and before you know it, he visits the bakery before closing time and brings along his dog, Eva. Josef and Sage become close friends. Sage even bakes biscuits especially for Eva. She tells Josef all about herself and her secret and he, too, opens up and tells her about his secret. He teaches Sage how to play chess. One day, Josef visits Sage and asks her to do him an extraordinary favour. Sage is flabbergasted at what she has learned and what Josef wants her to do. Whatever she chooses will change the course of her life. What does she choose to do is the big question?In The Storyteller, Jodi Picoult takes you by the hand and slowly eases you deeper and deeper into the story. This novel delves deeply into the tragedies of World War II. Picoult focuses on the injustices of the Jewish people and what they were exposed to, as told by the Holocaust survivors like Grandmother Minka.Jodi Picoult’s writing skills are outstanding in dealing with this subject matter. You will be filled with mixed emotions, mostly anger. How do you forgive the people involved with such atrocities?The Storyteller is a FIVE STAR WINNER!