Some of the moments these brave men and women told me will stay with me forever: such as Bernie, who pried a mezuzah from his door frame as the Nazis dragged him from his home, and held it curled in his fist throughout the entire war – so that it took two years to straighten his fingers after liberation. It was humbling and horrifying to realize that the stories they recounted were non-fiction. Some of those details went into the fictional history of my character, Minka. I met with several Holocaust survivors, who told me their stories.

Naturally, this research was among some of the most emotionally grueling I’ve ever done. The moral conundrum in which Wiesenthal found himself has been the starting point for many philosophical and moral analyses about the dynamics between victims of genocide and the perpetrators…and it got me thinking about what would happen if the same request was made, decades later, to a Jewish prisoner’s granddaughter. Wiesenthal recounts a moment when, as a concentration camp prisoner, he was brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew. This book actually began with another book – Simon Wiesenthal’s THE SUNFLOWER. In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy? With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.Įverything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret-one that nobody else in town would ever suspect-and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death.

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult