The Storyteller

Protagonist Sage Singer attends a grief therapy group meeting. Both of Sage’s parents are dead—her father died of a heart attack when she was nineteen, and her mother died three years later in a car accident. Sage has a large scar on her face from the accident; The scar and trauma of losing her parents have made her a self-conscious loner. She finds an emotional outlet in baking, having taken up her late father’s former hobby after his death. To avoid interacting with other people, Sage works the night shift at a local bakery called Our Daily Bread.

Sage ducks out of the meeting to use the bathroom. On the way back, she runs into a new participant, a 95-year-old German man named Josef Weber. She recognizes him as a frequent customer at Our Daily Bread who always writes in a black leather-bound journal. Josef is reluctant to open up during the meeting.

Our Daily Bread is attached to the Our Lady of Mercy shrine in Westerbrook, New Hampshire. The bakery is run by Mary, a former nun and the closest thing Sage has to a friend. Mary disapproves of Sage’s relationship with Adam, an attractive funeral home director whom she first met at her mother’s service. Adam is married to a woman named Shannon and father to twins Grace and Brian. Sage knows the affair is wrong but doesn’t think that she deserves a normal relationship. Every time she looks at her scar, she is reminded that she “did something awful” (35).

As Mary prepares to close the bakery ahead of Sage’s night shift, she realizes that Josef Weber is still inside. Sage surprises herself by inviting him to stay until the late bus comes. They make stilted conversation until Weber asks her what brought her to the grief group; Sage lies to him, replying that her mother died of cancer.

Sage reminisces about her late parents. Her mother and father were Jewish but followed “an abridged version” (30) of their religion which involved only select traditions. As a child Sage rebelled against Judaism, disliking how it set her apart from her small-town classmates. When she refused to have a bat mitzvah, her mother revealed that Sage’s grandma, Minka, was a Holocaust survivor. Sage flashes back to a childhood memory of accidentally seeing Minka’s identification number from Auschwitz tattooed onto her wrist.

Josef Weber continues to come into the bakery. Slowly, Sage opens up to him, even visiting him in his home and showing him the full extent of the scar that she usually hides behind her hair. She tells him that the scar is from a car accident and implies that her mother died in the same accident.

Josef soon becomes a regular at Our Daily Bread, so when he is absent from the bakery for two consecutive days, a worried Sage abandons her baking to check on him. She finds him alive and well, but her detour ruins all of her bread. The next morning, Mary slices into a ruined loaf and finds that Sage has accidentally baked the face of Jesus into the bread. Soon a media flurry descends on the bakery. Sage panics when a reporter thrusts a camera into her face and flees the bakery to hide out in the shrine. She’s surprised to find Josef already there and shocked when he asks her for a favor: He wants her to help him complete suicide. Sage refuses, telling him that she isn’t a murderer, but Josef replies that he is one. He shows Sage a photo of himself as a young man dressed in an SS uniform—Josef was a Nazi guard during WWII.