A

ROSA

Short Story by Cynthia Ozick, 1983

Cynthia Ozick's "Rosa" (1983) picks up the narrative of "The Shawl" approximately 30 years later. Both stories have been published together under the title The Shawl (1989). Stylistically "Rosa" represents a marked divergence from the earlier text. Whereas "The Shawl" is a compact, largely impressionistic description of a single traumatic experience, "Rosa" is a straightforward narrative that gradually builds to its denouement. "Rosa" is also written in the comic mode that recalls much of Ozick's other fiction. This stylistic distinction reinforces the ontological distinction between the stories' environments: the first takes place in a concentration camp, the second in Miami. By choosing an indirect, figurative style for the first story and a more direct, narrative style for the second, Ozick implies that different representational modes are necessary to describe experiences during the Holocaust and after.

"Rosa" centers on the character of Rosa Lublin, a concentration camp survivor who was forced to observe the murder of her infant daughter. Rosa is now a "madwoman and a scavenger" living in a community of retired Jews in Miami, where she has recently moved after smashing up her antique store in New York. Contemptuous of the Yiddish-speaking old socialists and idealists that surround her, she spends her days as a recluse. Her one pastime involves writing letters in "the most excellent literary Polish" to an imaginary correspondent: her daughter Magda, who was killed as an infant by the Nazis. Rosa variously imagines Magda as a professor of Greek history at Columbia, as a successful doctor living in the suburbs, or as an unblemished girl at 16. She also eagerly awaits a package from her niece Stella containing Magda's shawl, a token from the past Rosa has come to worship (according to Stella) like a religious relic. But Rosa's world of fantasy, in which she seems willfully to have enclosed herself, is an insufficient bulwark against all intruders. During a visit to the laundromat, she is approached by Persky, a flirtatious older man who is determined to bring Rosa back to the world of the living.

Rosa and Persky represent radically divergent forms of Jewish identity. She epitomizes the European Jew who worships the symbols of Western high culture while reviling anything that smacks of old-world Jewishness. She proudly recalls that her father did not have "a particle of ghetto left in him, not a grain of rot." As for Persky, he reads a Yiddish newspaper and playfully jabs at Rosa like a Borscht Belt comic. Having imagined herself "a future Marie Curie," Rosa is humiliated to find herself in America where she is routinely associated with unspectacular Jewish immigrants like Persky. When Persky points out that they are both from Warsaw, Rosa is quick to correct him: "My Warsaw is not your Warsaw." Her lofty self-conception leaves no room for his heymish, or old-world Jewishness.

The story develops into a quest narrative. Rosa realizes that a pair of underwear is missing from her laundry bag and, convinced that she has been robbed (perhaps by Persky), she searches for them along Miami's beachfront. Her futile quest for a lost object represents her own existential situation. Accordingly the gates around private beaches appear to her as barbed wire. Stumbling upon gay lovers in the sand and wandering through a palatial hotel, Rosa imagines she is stuck in Sodom. The turning point in the story occurs when she discovers, the next day in her apartment, her missing underwear curled inside a towel. After this discovery her first act is to reconnect her telephone, a gesture that signals a triumph (at least for the time being) over her self-imposed exile from the world. It seems she has glimpsed the folly at the root of her paranoia. Even Magda's shawl, which arrives and prompts one last epistolary outburst, begins to dim in significance. "And Magda! Already she was turning away." When the phone rings announcing a visit from Persky, Rosa decides to welcome him in.

Thus, according to one reading, "Rosa" stages the return to human relations of a woman who has become trapped in her own mourning. But while Persky's generous sociability might seem the antidote to Rosa's despair and cultural elitism, the story resists simply casting Rosa as victim and Persky as savior. Persky, it turns out, has a wife in a mental hospital, which, as he callously relates, "don't cost me peanuts." He also tells Rosa about her own situation that "sometimes a little forgetting is necessary." In her fidelity to the past, Rosa represents a witness, a bearer of historical memory in a world of amnesiacs. Her imaginative re-creation of Magda is a triumph as well as a delusion, and the story's conclusion is tentative enough to imply that Rosa has not completely abandoned her commitment to Magda and the lost world she represents.