<P>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 <i>The New Yorker.</i> Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for <i>Best American Short Stories.</i></p><p>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 shawl—a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her or even magically conjure her back to life.</p>