Elsie

Elsie Meriwether Schmidt is a seventeen year-old girl living in Nazi Germany during World War II at the beginning of the novel. By the end of the story, she is an eighty year-old mother, widow, and baker living in Texas in the present day. Elsie is the daughter of Papa and Mutti, the sister of Hazel, the widow of Al Meriwether, and the mother of Jane.

As a girl, Elsie is an unenthusiastic Nazi who harbors a secret love of America. Engaged to Josef, Elsie hides the Jewish Tobias in her room. It is through Tobias that Elsie discovers her moral conscience and turns totally against Nazism and Josef. After the war, Elsie has a love affair with an American soldier that leads to an abortion which nearly kills Elsie. Elsie is saved by Albert Meriwether. She falls in love and later marries Meriwether.

In the United States...