Why Go Back

Its Friday morning, somehow I had forgotten to write my blog entry for last night, so I am hoping you would accept this one even though it is 8 hours late.

I am going to write this blog entry on Rosa and the delusional world that she has forced herself back into. When you read this novella, you quickly learn about the tragedy in her experience during the Holocaust, which then leads into a short story of her life after the Holocaust. Once she gets settled into New York City, she appears to have her life back under control; she owns a antique store and is living a very comfortable life. But out of nowhere, old resentments and feelings of hate are brought up by the customers that drift into her store, leading her to possibly the most rash decision of destroying everything in the store with a hammer. If she wanted out of this sort of business she could have sold the store and made even more money. I understand that she feels everything in that store has its own sense of history and culture, which is not seen by these young folk that come in looking to buy old stuff but this is the impact of time. Time doesn’t stop for anyone and through that certain things get lost. In this case, the next generation has furthered itself from events such as the Holocaust leaving nothing but Rosa to dwell wither own memories.

The destruction she causes in her store spirals into a whirlwind of disaster for this poor, aging woman who is then caught up in the evils of her own dreaded memories. Through these awful memories she continuously sinks lower and lower, taking herself from her life of luxury to a life that very much so represents her past during the Holocaust. Perhaps she couldn’t help it being so used to those conditions for so many years during World War II but it is depressing to read how she threw away a life that appeared so good for memories of her past that cannot change the present she is living in.

Living in conditions that echo the Holocaust will not bring back your dead daughter whom you write to as if she were a professor at Columbia. The worst has already happened Rosa. It appeared as if you did move on and created a life that was much better than the one you had in Europe, but for reasons we can only guess at, you would rather sulk and become a delusional old woman than live a more luxurious life and try to repress the memories of a terrible time.