The Baker’s Daughter

The Baker’s Daugh­ter is about as com­plex a novel as the title seems sim­ple. The daugh­ter is Elsie Schmidt of Garmisch, Ger­many. The novel’s Pro­logue intro­duces us to Elsie’s mother, not only the wife of a baker, but the keeper of secrets. Ger­many, July 1945 should set off alarms, but McCoy doesn’t take the most direct route to her story, jump­ing ahead in Chap­ter One to El Paso, Texas, Novem­ber of 2007.

The novel has two pro­tag­o­nists: Reba Adams, who left her fam­ily in Vir­ginia to pur­sue a writ­ing career in El Paso, Texas, and war-​​bride Elsie Schmidt Mer­ri­wether, once of Garmisch, Ger­many, but now also of El Paso.

Reba, a jour­nal­ist for a local El Paso mag­a­zine, is assigned to inter­view Elsie, the owner of a pop­u­lar El Paso Ger­man bak­ery, for a piece on Ger­man Christ­mas tra­di­tions in the magazine’s Decem­ber issue. Author Sarah McCoy does not so much weave the sto­ries of these two women together as shows their lives in par­al­lel. Elsie’s life as a baker’s daugh­ter liv­ing in Ger­many as it nears defeat is told through let­ters and flash­backs, and Reba’s as a young writer find­ing her voice and her way in the world is told in a trou­bled present. When the two women meet and the inter­views begin, their sto­ries con­tinue to be told side by side. The lines do not cross until the inter­view stalls and Reba won­ders if she will make her dead­line. McCoy nails it with the obser­va­tion: “It was the Nazi thing.” Not just for Reba, but for the reader as well. We all know par­al­lel lines can never meet, but McCoy proves this rule wrong.

This is a novel of moth­ers and daugh­ters, sis­ters (and grand­moth­ers), of romance, love, war, fear, inse­cu­rity, patri­o­tism, cow­ardice, lies, despair, and, ulti­mately, truth and under­stand­ing. Elsie’s courage is not only in sur­viv­ing the Third Reich, but in rec­og­niz­ing that Ger­many was no longer the coun­try she loved as a girl; and her story echoes in Reba’s strug­gle to deal with the real­ity of her life as a writer and as the fiancée of Ricki Chavez, a Bor­der Patrol­man involved in the roundup and deten­tion of ille­gal immi­grants. The 62 years between 1945 and 2007 become uncom­fort­ably clouded. Reba’s mag­a­zine arti­cle becomes some­thing very dif­fer­ent from what she intended to write.

McCoy’s novel is not about the cul­pa­bil­ity of a nation, but rather the under­stand­ing of how human hearts can remain unmoved in the face of inhu­man­ity. In spite of some uneven­ness, I think the novel suc­ceeds. What brought the two women together, while shar­ing cof­fee and fine baked goods, was the shar­ing itself, which is always a path to under­stand­ing our­selves and each other. The inclu­sion of recipes for some of Elsie’s baked treats at the end of the book was a dis­trac­tion for this reader, but who knows? If even one of the recipes turns out, eaten with a good cup of cof­fee or tea, may get the reader to think­ing; and what nov­el­ist could ask for more than that?

Buy The Baker’s Daugh­ter: A Novel locally or look online at Ama​zon​.com, Powell’s Books, or through an IndieBound book­store.