If the Holocaust were simplified enough to explain it in a child’s tale, it could be described as good vs. evil. There’s no question as to who are the bad guys in this unfortunately true story. But as Jodi Picoult points out in her newest novel, The Storyteller, the Grimm brothers didn’t intend for fairy tales to be black and white, or even have happy endings. Sometimes, the bad guys, no matter how terrible they are, have consciences too.
The Storyteller revolves around a troubled young baker, Sage, who meets an old man, Josef Weber, in her grief group. After they become friends, he tells her that he was an SS soldier and asks her to not only forgive him for his sins, but to kill him so that he doesn’t have to keep living a lie. This admission would be a shock for anyone to hear, but Sage, though she states that she is an atheist, has a grandmother who survived Auschwitz. She decides to report Josef to the authorities. Enter Leo Stein, a Nazi hunter from the Department of Justice.
Picoult uses her usual storytelling format, allowing the well-written plot to unravel through the point-of-views of multiple characters. The best part of the novel, however, is when Sage’s grandmother, Minka, tells her story of growing up in Poland and surviving Auschwitz. We are transported to Europe as Minka describes her happy childhood in Lodz and how she and her family were slowly exiled from her beautiful city, into the Ghetto and finally into the concentration camps.
It may sound similar to other Holocaust stories, but, as Leo points out, these stories have to be retold over and over again, until finally history stops repeating itself. Even though Josef Weber is over 90 years old, punishing him may stop someone today from committing genocide.
Minka survives because she is clever and resourceful. Most of the prisoners in Auschwitz were not as lucky as her. Even though the reader knows that Minka will make it through the horrors of the camp, it is still captivating to listen to how she clings to life, even though she hasn’t eaten real food in years and her entire family has been torn from her.
Minka’s story, however, isn’t just one about herself. She, like Picoult, is a writer. While she’s in Auschwitz, Minka pens the story of a Polish vampire who isn’t entirely evil. If it wasn’t obvious before, Picoult even has one of her SS characters point out that this monster has a conscience too. The whole vampire theme has been overdone over the past few years, but Picoult makes it her theme by focusing on its fairy tale qualities. As the main character of her story realizes that the vampire might not be completely horrible, the reader can see how maybe some of the SS soldiers feel guilty for what they are doing. Only Picoult could take something as horrible as the Holocaust and suggest that it is possible to even conceive of forgiving a Nazi, that some feelings are so complicated that a single word can never describe them.
Once Minka’s story is over, it’s almost a disappointment to go back into the present day. Picoult is forced to include too many coincidences to make her plot work, though her typical plot twists at the end make them almost forgivable. If one ignores these coincidences, then they can appreciate how well Picoult combines Minka’s and Josef’s stories with the characters in present-day New Hampshire, who are extremely well-developed. As usual, Picoult did an impeccable job researching this novel, not only talking to Holocaust survivors, but to the Department of Justice, Catholics and even bakers to make sure that every detail was as accurate as possible.
Though the plot and characters are enthralling, it’s Picoult’s writing itself that will make readers want to re-read this book and keep reading her work. She crafts beautiful sentences that cause the reader to really think, such as, “It is as if she knew, even at a young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart. If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds.” The Storyteller is more than just a good story, it’s a tale that examines the truth from so many different perspectives so that good and evil are blurred to the point that even a Nazi might be more than a monster, that the words good and evil might not mean anything anymore.
