What Rosa Brought

Rosa lives in Austria, but what will happen when the family leaves their home in the face of persecution? What will they be able to take with them?

When in the half-title page and dedication, and in the first openings with the narrative, Rosa looks out over sunny, yellow-saturated Vienna, all seems right with the world. Grandma looks after the little girl, they share books and go to the park while Rosa’s parents work in their bakery. ‘Then the Nazis came, and things changed.’ With two short lines, and an opening dominated by a grey line of soldiers with scarlet Nazi flags, we are in a far less comfortable world.  As the situation worsens for the family there is a bold use of a grey saturation creeping into the illustration, which suggests both black and white photographs and, more subtly, the growing shadow of sadness and suffering. Even Dad’s ingenious way of continuing to make money doesn’t help, and leaving becomes the family’s only option. As the crisis deepens the Rabbi asks if there is a way to smuggle out the Torah if he leaves. What, Rosa wonders, would she take if they had to leave?

Depiction of Nazi oppression presents a considerable challenge because it depends on the reader’s understanding of the persecution experienced by minorities under Nazi rule. This narrative approach contrasts with Rose Blanche by Ian McEwan and Roberto Innocenti. The knowing reader will be saddened as Rosa leaves Austria never to see her grandma again, but rather than focussing on the horrors of the Holocaust, What Rosa Brought concentrates, as Rosa and her parents leave for America, on the love she carries with her. On the cover Rosa sits on a trunk with Vienna behind her and New York ahead, surrounded by images of what she may have lost or brought with her. This is echoed on the last page where Rosa’s heritage, shown in a drifting Hebrew script, is behind her, and the sun is rising on America.

In a society where migrants can be seen as needy rather than contributing, Weinstein and Wheeler end on what Rosa brings with her: memory, hope, and love.