Read by Yelena Shmulenson

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, The Shawl and Rosa succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories. In The Shawl, a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In Rosa, that same woman appears thirty years later, a madwoman and a scavenger in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawla shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life

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