Rosa by Cynthia Ozick -- Summary

Rosa lives in Miami, Florida in a decrepit hotel for which Stella pays rent. She is retired after having axed her own junk shop vusiness. She writes letters to Stella to remain on good terms with her, and to Magda. She imagines Magda is alive. She writes her in Polish which she considers far superior to either English or Yiddish. She finally leaves her room to do some laundry at a Laundromat, where she meets Simon Persky, a Jew who left Poland before the War. She feels she is superior to him because he speaks Polish and English. He insists on courting her even though she behaves nastily towards him.

She gets a package that she assumes is Magda's shawl, sent her by the reluctant Stella who has been taking psychology classes and regards Rosa's attachment to the shawl as unhealthy. Instead, it is a book sent her by Dr. Tree, a psychologist doing research on Holocaust survivors. Rosa resents being treated as a clinical subject rather than a human being.

Rosa thinks Persky has taken her underwear. She goes around town looking for it, to no avail. She gets trapped in a private hotel beach where homosexual couples are engaged in sexual activity in the sand. She enters the hotel looking for the way out and seeks the manager of the hotel to complain about the barbed wire that surrounds the beach. She tells him it's Nazi of him to do so but he kicks her out.

Persky visits her again.

She gets the box with Magda's shawl and opens it. Soon afterwards, Magda "comes alive" – Rosa sees her as though she was alive, and in fact believes she is alive and that she is only pretending to Stella that Magda is dead.

In the end, Magda shrinks away from the ringing phone.

Cynthia Ozick