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Becoming friends with Josef Weber, an old man who is particularly loved in her community, Sage Singer is shocked when one day he asks her to kill him and reveals why he deserves to die, causing her to question her beliefs.
BookshelfMonstrosity: These thought-provoking novels examine the atrocious activities and difficult decisions made during the Holocaust, the legacy of World War II, and the links between identity and humanity.
My first Jodi Picoult book - what an amazing, visual storyteller; no pun intended. I read the book on a friend’s suggestion; I am glad I did. The Storyteller is an in-depth account of surviving, overcoming hate, and learning when forgiveness is yours to give. The story was intriguing and held my attention, but, and I know I’m in the minority here, there was sometimes so much detail I found my mind wandering - how is that a thing?! I wonder if my inattention was because the writing dredged up too much emotion in me...
This is not a negative to Ms. Picoult or her writing, I wish I could write this intensely, but a comment to my own ADD. Reader beware, this book will suck you in but if you need a super fast-pace, or if connecting to your feelings is uncomfortable, you may find yourself wishing for less detail.
I would highly recommend this book and will read another Jodi Picoult in the future - I will just be more prepared to have my feelers touched. ( )
my first picoult and i was surprised by how well it’s written and how thoughtful so much of it is. i was also really surprised by what the story ended up being as i went into it blind. which i guess is good because i wouldn’t have chosen a holocaust story on my own. and i think i would have preferred if that entire storyline wasn’t there or was much more condensed, as it’s just not something i need to read about, especially if what we’re doing is humanizing the nazis. that said, this was well done and brought up interesting questions. i’m not sure that i like the decision that sage made in the end, or that i agree with the conclusion she came to (at least in that moment) but i appreciate the question that picoult brings up. she’s talking about the ordinariness of evil, the way we all make mistakes, the way something can live inside us forever. she’s asking questions about forgiveness and justice and guilt and i’d probably prefer she didn’t answer them for us, but sage’s decision (against the backdrop of leo’s opinion) makes for interesting discussions, i'm sure. i also really always like the book within a book thing, and that’s true here too, especially in the parallels between that story and the flashback story. still, i would have preferred less of that and more of the contemporary story, as i don’t feel the need to read too many holocaust stories anymore, and it felt like that part took up too many pages and maybe was a little trauma porn-ish at times. and the interesting part is really in the processing and the modern day questions that the holocaust brings up. ( )
Absolutely LOVED this book! Haunting is a good way to describe it, with enough humor to keep you from feeling totally depressed. My absolute favorite book of hers so far. ( )
The Storyteller is a perfectly titled book. This beautifully written book actually weaves many stories. I wasn’t sure what I was in for when I met Sage at a grief group. She’s an introverted baker who meets Joseph, an elderly widowed man. I quickly became engrossed when the heart of the book tells Sage’s grandmother’s story, an Auschwitz survivor. Wow! What a story. There’s so much more that follows. This became quite an emotionally powerful read. It will definitely stay with me for a long time. ( )
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
When I reach the age of Twenty I will explore this world of plenty In a motorized bird myself I will sit And soar into space Oh! so brightly lit I will float, I will fly to the world so lovely so far, I will float, I will fly above rivers and sea The cloud is my sister, the wind a brother to me. --from "A Dream" by Avraham (Abramek) Koplowicz b. 1930. He was a child of the Lodz ghetto. He was taken from the ghetto on the final transport to Auschwitz-Birknau in 1944 and was murdered there at age fourteen. This poem has been translated from the original Polish by Ida Meretyk-Spinka, 2012
Dedication
For my mother, Jane Picoult, because you taught me there is nothing more important than family. And because after twenty years, its your turn again.
First words
My father trusted me with the details of his death.
Quotations
There are all sorts of losses people suffer—from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.
That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?
But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.
I cannot justify why I've picked Josef, a virtual stranger, to reveal myself to. Maybe because loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.
And me: I find myself talking about things that I have long packed up, like a spinster's hope chest.
Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.
It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.
Shayla is born-again; this isn't a surprise. But it still makes me uncomfortable, as if she is specifically talking about my ineligibility.
"I believe in Hell...but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once."
"Ach. Well. A long time ago, someone once told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready. I assumed that it wasn't ready."
A twenty-five-year-old disfigured girl and a nonagenarian? I suppose there have been stranger duos.
It reminds me of photos I have seen of soldiers on the eve of being shipped out, wearing too much bravado like a cloying aftershave.
My mind unravels back to Josef, to the Jews in the camp. When you are singled out for torture because of your faith, can religion still be a beacon?
Adam gently ties the sutures so that the mouth cannot drop open but looks naturally set. I imagine Josef dying, his mouth being sewn shut, all his secrets trapped inside.
It was the first time I remember learning that people are never who they seem to be.
"I'm a certified bra fitter," Irene says. "I'm working at Nordstrom." ¶ "Certified," I repeat. I wonder where the legitimizing agency for bra fitters is. If you get grades: A, B, C, D, and DD. "It sounds like a very...unique job." ¶ "It's a handful," Irene says, and then she laughs. "Get it?" ¶ "Um. Yeah." ¶ "I'm doing bra fitting now so I can put myself through school and do what I 'really' want." ¶ "Mammography?" I guess.
"It's okay, Leo. Actually, I think it's really sexy." ¶ "What is?" ¶ "The way you can wave your voice around, like it's a flag."
But at any given moment, we are capable of doing what we least expect.
"There was a look in their eyes, sometimes...They weren't dreading the trigger being pulled, even if the gun was already pointed at them. It was as if they ran toward it. I could not fathom this, at first. How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven."
Inside, in small, tight cursive, words crawl across the page, packed end to end, without any white space, as if that were a luxury. Maybe, back then, it was.
For just a moment, when Josef let his own death mask slip, I could see the man he used to be: the one buried beneath the kindly exterior for so many decades, like a root growing slow beneath pavement, still capable of cracking concrete.
The word 'Jew' makes me shudder, as if such a term should not even be allowed to take up passing residence on his lips.
The cries were soft and hitched together like train cars.
But as I leave Josef's house, I cannot help but wonder if my grandmother is one of the ones he doesn't recall. And if 'he' is one of the ones she has worked so hard to forget. The inequity there makes me sick to my stomach.
It is like he said: we believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we'd rather pretend doesn't exist.
"Look, all I'm saying is that it wouldn't hurt you to hold a grudge longer than a single breath." ¶ "Isn't that a little Old Testament for a nun?" ¶ "Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from 'The Sound of Music'? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance."
Yet I, who fancied myself a writer, couldn't find a single word to describe not only what I had seen but how everything had changed, as if the earth had tilted slightly on its axis, ashamed of the sun, so that now we would have to learn to live in the dark.
During that forty-eight-hour stretch, I passed the gallows six times—going to the bakery, to Darija's, to school. After the first two times, I stopped noticing. It was as if death had become part of the landscape.
I squinted. One moment I could not see past the low light and the shorn head and the bruises on her face. And then the next, I recognized Darija. ¶ Just like that, I became human again.
Nothing grew in Auschwitz. No grass, no mushrooms, no weeds, no buttercups. The landscape was dusty and gray, a wasteland.
There was always a little ripple of awareness when Herr Dybbuk arrived or departed, as if his presence was an electric shock.
There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.
I rolled the yarn up around my arm like a bandage, a tourniquet for a soul that was bleeding out.
I stopped counting the day. They all ran together, like chalk in the rain: shuffling from one side of the camp to the other, standing in line for a bowl of soup that was nothing more than hot water boiled with a turnip. I thought I had known hunger; I had no idea.
Every morning, being marched to Kanada, I would see Jews waiting in the groves until it was their turn at the crematoria. They were still wearing their clothes, and I wondered how long it might be before I found myself ripping the lining of that wool coat or digging into the pockets of those trousers. As I walked by I kept my gaze trained on the ground. If I had been looking up, they would pity me, with my shaved head and my scarecrow body. If I had been looking up, they would see my face and know that what they were about to be told—that this shower was just a precaution, before they were sent out to work—was a lie. If I had been looking up, I would have been tempted to shout out the truth, to tell them that the smell wasn't from a factory or kitchen but from their own friends and relatives being incinerated. I would have started to scream and maybe I would never have stopped.
Some of the women prayed. I saw no point in that; since if there was a God, He would not have let this happen. Others said that the conditions at Auschwitz were so horrendous God chose not to go there. If I prayed for anything it was to fall asleep quickly without concentrating on my stomach digesting its own lining.
I began to feel a great responsibility, as if my mind was a vessel, and I had the duty of keeping a record of those who were gone. We had ample opportunity to steal clothing, but the first thing I stole from Kanada was not a scarf or a pair of warm socks. It was someone else's memories.
I didn't see it as stealing. I saw it as archiving. Before I went to sleep I would take out these photos, this growing deck of the dead, and whisper my way through their names. Ania, Herschel, Gerda, Haim. Wolf, Mindla, Dworja, Izrael. Szymon, Elka. Rochl and Chaja, the twins. Eliasz, still wailing after his bris. Szandla, on her wedding day. ¶ As long as I remembered them, then they were still here.
Sometimes all you to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.
Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent.
"It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind."
Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.
My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardest shard of rock.
Sometimes they would take the living, too. It was an honest mistake; we didn't always know which was which.
I listen to Tauba keening, turned inside out by loss.
The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. ¶ What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? ¶ Love isn't the only word that fails. ¶ Hate does, too.
If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. ¶ And if you didn't, you will never understand.
History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.
I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for—even if it's just a better tomorrow—is the most powerful drug on this planet.
You can believe, for example, that a dead-end job is a career. You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.
Sage's house is the visual representation of that favorite sweatshirt you own, the one that you search through your drawer for, because it's so comfortable. The couch is overstuffed, the light creamy and soft. There's always something baking. It is the kind of place you could settle down for a few moments and wake up, years later, because you never left.
It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.
"I don't know what this person did to you, and I am not sure I want to. But forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.'"
Becoming friends with Josef Weber, an old man who is particularly loved in her community, Sage Singer is shocked when one day he asks her to kill him and reveals why he deserves to die, causing her to question her beliefs.
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Book description
Sage Singer, a baker is asked by Josef Weber to make a moral choice. It will make her draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy.
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This is not a negative to Ms. Picoult or her writing, I wish I could write this intensely, but a comment to my own ADD. Reader beware, this book will suck you in but if you need a super fast-pace, or if connecting to your feelings is uncomfortable, you may find yourself wishing for less detail.
I would highly recommend this book and will read another Jodi Picoult in the future - I will just be more prepared to have my feelers touched. (