The Storyteller

The twisted crown rolls from the Ania story reappear throughout the narrative. In most cases, they are a symbol of love, although their final appearance subverts this meaning as Sage uses a crown roll to kill Josef.

Baking is a tradition in the Singer family, passed down from Minka’s father all the way down to Sage and associated with family connections and love. The crown rolls first appear in the Ania story. Ania’s father, the village baker, makes her a special roll every night as a sign of his affection. The bread is a symbol of comfort and familial ties.

Later, after her father has died, and Aleks has taken over baking, he bakes Ania a similar roll. In the moment, this seems like a gesture of compassion for Ania’s loss. Later, it is revealed that Aleks is an upiór and that the princess roll had his blood baked into it, giving Ania immunity from his bloodthirst. This reveal takes the princess roll from a simple gesture of affection to an act of protective love.

Sage bakes two crown rolls in the novel. One is for her grandmother Minka on the day Leo asks Minka to relive her traumatic experiences during the Holocaust. This roll is a callback to the comforts of Minka’s childhood. The second roll Sage bakes is for Josef and contains the deadly monkshood which ends his life. On first glance, it seems ironic that a symbol for love has become the vessel for death and hatred. However, Josef, tormented by his own sins, has spent the entire novel begging Sage to kill him. Viewed in this light, her poisoning him is actually fulfilling his final wish and freeing him from a lifetime of emotional anguish. The final crown roll represents both kindness and cruelty, suggesting that love and hatred are more closely linked than they would seem and tying into the novel’s theme of the complexity of good and evil.

The story that Minka begins writing as a child and gives up after Auschwitz is woven throughout The Storyteller in short sections. It’s a motif that helps explain several of The Storyteller’s key themes, including the duality of good and evil and the complexity of moral choice.

At Auschwitz, Josef connects with the upióry in Minka’s story, moved by the idea of a monster with a conscience. He sees the two murderous brothers as an allegory for himself and Reiner, and when he asks Minka what made them evil, he is really grappling with his own morality and the role he plays in the Holocaust. He becomes obsessed with finding an ending to the story because he needs to know whether Aleks, an extension of himself, will be forgiven or left to suffer forever.

Events in the Ania story mirror events in the main narrative. In both stories, a remorseful predator (Josef/Aleks) asks someone who has been indirectly victimized by their actions (Sage/Ania) to kill them in order to free them from their suffering. Sage and Ania are both written to be sympathetic characters with good hearts, but both are shown to choose violence under the right circumstances, playing on the idea that all humans are capable of righteousness and wickedness.

Josef never gets the ending to the Ania story because Minka can’t bring herself to write it down. Instead she leaves it unfinished, symbolizing the fact that Josef’s fate is not predetermined. Sage ultimately determines it by helping him complete his death but denying him the forgiveness he wants. In his dying moments, Josef asks Sage how the Ania story ends, still looking for an answer that will forever be out of reach.