WHAT ROSA BROUGHT

“Then the Nazis came, and things changed.”

In Vienna, Rosa’s parents work in their grocery store while Grandma watches over the child. Then Nazi flags appear everywhere, and hatred against Jews, like Rosa and her family, becomes rampant. Grandma tries to answer Rosa’s perplexed questions as gently as possible, but how can you explain the unexplainable? When Jews are banned from owning businesses, Dad surreptitiously builds and sells one trunk at a time for departing Jewish neighbors, even helping a rabbi hide a Torah in a false bottom. The family desperately waits for a visa that will allow them to flee to America. Rosa, in her innocence, imagines what she might take with her when they leave, seen as white-line ghostlike objects floating around her. When the visas finally come, and there isn’t one for Grandma, Rosa takes the most important thing of all on the journey: Grandma’s love. Drawing inspiration from his mother’s childhood experiences, Weinstein employs spare, carefully selected language, without sugarcoating, to describe the rapidly escalating events. Wheeler’s illustrations inform the wider, more harrowing tale, gradually growing darker and more fraught with menacing vignettes of book burnings and broken windows. After viewing the family’s apartment, nearly emptied of belongings, and watching them eat in a soup kitchen, readers will find the family’s sadness, fear, and hunger to be palpable.

Heartrending, tender, and eye-opening.