The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer—from the small to the large. You can lose your 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?

The reason it’s important to believe in something, he said, is because you can.

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.

You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to to believe the best about someone if you truly love him,” Josef says.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

You will notice I say nothing about the Jews. That is because most of us didn’t know a single Jew. Out of sixty million Germans, only 500,000 were Jews, and even those would have called themselves Germans, not Jews. But anti-Semitism was alive and well in Germany long before Hitler became powerful. It was part of what we were taught in church, how two thousand years ago, the Jews had killed our Lord. It was evident in the way we viewed Jews—good investors, who seemed to have money in a bad economy when no one else had any. Selling the idea that the Jews were to blame for all of Germany’s problems was just not that difficult.

Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy.

This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor. He threaded this philosophy through the Nazi Party, directing his diatribes against those who leaned left politically. Yet the Nazis pointed out the linkage between Jews and the left; Jews and crime; Jews and unpatriotic behavior. If people hated Jews already for religious reasons or ec...

“Why didn’t I say no?” Josef mulls. “Why didn’t so many of us? Because we so badly wanted to believe what Hitler told us. That the future would be better than our present.”

I don’t know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it’s the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now… if she is somewhere.

“Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”

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,” written by Avraham (Abramek) Koplowicz, b. 1930. He was a child in the Łódź ghetto. He was taken from the ghetto on the final transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and was murdered there at age fourteen. This poem has been translated from the original Polish by Ida Meretyk-Spinka, 2012.

“How can you grab a suitcase and pack up your life?” she asked my sister. “You’d leave all your memories behind.”

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. —Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl

History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.

“So according to the desk clerk here at the luxurious Courtyard by Marriott, who I think may be violating child labor laws, the FedEx truck shows up shortly before eleven,” Leo says.

‘What he did was wrong. He doesn’t deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it’s choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.’

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.”

It does not matter who forgives you, if you’re the one who can’t forget.