Finkelstein

Finkelstein is the manager of the Hotel Marie Louise. Rosa is trapped on the hotel's private beach when she inadvertently trespasses. After she escapes, she rages at Finkelstein for having barbed wire around the perimeter of the hotel beach.

Rosa Lublin

The title character of the story, Rosa Lublin—who reflexively gives her name as Lublin, Rosa—is a fifty-eight-year-old Holocaust survivor now living in Miami, Florida. Rosa lost her only child, a baby daughter named Magda, when a Nazi guard threw the baby against an electrified fence. Rosa's life stopped at this moment; she tells Simon Persky: "Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays." For Rosa, the Holocaust has never really ended.

Rosa is full of contradictions. She is Jewish and yet anti-Semitic; she has contempt for Persky yet fixes her hair and worries about a hole in her dress while she is...