The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult.

                The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult, Book Review.

"I wrote this book because stories matter, and there are six million people who did not have the opportunity to tell theirs."(Picoult)

Some stories need to be told and retold. Can someone who's committed truly heinous acts ever atone with subsequent good behaviour? Put another way-should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? Can we or should we forgive the unforgivable?

This harrowing and unforgettable journey through the Holocaust was inspired by Simon Wiesenthal's book  The Sunflower. He was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, brought to the deathbed of an SS soldier who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew. From this, Picoult explored whether decades later the same request made to a Jewish prisoner's granddaughter would have the same moral conundrum over genocide victims and their perpetrators. This is the dilemma faced by Sage Singer, from New Hampshire where the story is set, one of many storytellers but it is Minka's story which dominates the novel and will leave a lasting impression, believe me!

As part of her research Picoult spoke to a group of Holocaust survivors as well as relying on witness testimony from the Nuremberg trials of transcripts of Nazis who had been captured by the Department of Justice. Minka, Sage's grandmother is based on several people that the writer interviewed. It adds realism and makes her experiences powerful and unforgettable.

Sage is 25 years of age and was involved in a car accident that seriously injured her mother and left Sage with facial scars. She felt like a monster with an eyelid that drooped "raw and red, a jagged lightning bolt splitting the symmetry of my face." They were silver, ruched, rippling her cheek and brow like the "neck of a silver purse." Her father had died from a heart attack when Sage was 19 and her mother died 3 years later. She seemed isolated from her sisters believing that they blamed her for her mother's death so the only person she loved was Minka, a survivor from the concentration camps where so many people were brutally murdered.

She had been attending a grief counselling group for 3 years: Helping Hands, aptly called. She was the only one from the original group and came for punishment not healing. Sage was still traumatised by her mother's death referring to it as something that "still feels like a sword has been run through my ribs every time I think of her." Before the accident she was shy, after it she became reclusive.

A new member, Josef Weber joined the group and befriended Sage. He has gained a reputation as being a saint by the locals. Sage's boss, Mary refers to him as everyone's adoptive cuddly grandfather. He coached basketball and taught German at the high school. He lived in Canada for 22 years before moving to New Hampshire. But he was weighed down by a guilty conscience and a strong desire to die. He chose to befriend Sage knowing that she is from a Jewish family although not a practising Jew. He was a Nazi officer responsible for killing thousands of innocent Jews.

"There is a reason God has kept me alive for this long. He wants me to feel what THEY felt. They prayed for their lives but had no control over them; I pray for my death but have no control over it."

He has had cancer twice, survived a car crash and had a broken hip but he was still alive and in his nineties. He asked Sage to help him die, to carry out assisted suicide. No matter how much he wanted to die he tells her he cannot. He was like the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming, for telling Christ to walk faster. Not an easy decision for anyone. First Sage listened to his family history and his associations with the Hitler Youth Movement before becoming an SS officer.

"I convinced myself I was of pure race, Aryan. That I deserved things others did not, simply by the accident of my birth…that hubris that arrogance." In 1942 he was sent to Annus Mundi, the asshole of the world, known to us as Auschwitz where he met up with his younger brother Franz. Sage knew that Minka was a survivor from the same camp and felt extremely uncomfortable with the prospect of her grandmother coexisting in a world with a former Nazi who might well have tortured and threatened her. "How could someone who murdered innocent people look so…so…ordinary?"

Sage knows that she needs to hear Minka's story whilst she is still alive to understand the horrors committed by the likes of Josef before she can assist in his suicide. One final requirement is that she has to forgive him for his gross wrongdoings before he dies. According to Judaism the only people with the capacity to forgive are the ones to whom the wrong was done and of course, they were dead.

And it is Minka's story, the one about  monsters and vampires that parallels her life under Nazi rule and kept her alive as well as the real horror of how she experienced inhumanity. It is an emotional and compelling tale and will leave a painful reminder of 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis. Unforgettable.

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN: 978-1-444-76666-0

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

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