The Significance of Dr. Tree

What is the significance of Dr. Tree and his study? Why does Rosa reject his version of reality? What does she object to? Can you make any connections between her attitude toward Tree and her attitude toward Stella?

In the second story in Cynthia Ozick’s compilation The Shawl, Rosa Lublin, for whom the story is named, is still struggling to move beyond the impact of her time at the concentration camps and the loss of her daughter Magda, who was murdered by a guard.  Rosa lives in Florida, a place that she has relegated herself to in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the World War II camps, a setting outside of which she is unable to truly function. 

Dr. Tree, a psychologist at the Department of Clinical Social Pathology at the University of Kansas-Iowa, is studying this pattern of behavior, something he refers to as Repressed Animation.  Ultimately, he would like Rosa to be a part of his study.  This request invokes in Rosa the same emotions that led to her destroying her store in New York—Rosa sees herself and other Holocaust survivors as individuals, a community deeply and egregiously wronged.  She wants the world to know her story, but she rarely finds someone willing to listen.  In her eyes, however, Dr. Tree is treating Rosa and her fellow survivors as numbers on a list, subjects to be studied, not human beings trying to recover from a traumatic experience.

Essentially, Dr. Tree’s study and Rosa’s niece, Stella, play similar roles in the stories; both represent the reality of a world that has moved on from the horrors of World War II, whereas Rosa, especially because of the loss of Magda, has been unable to live consciously in  that world.  She feels a deep anger towards Stella and blames her for Magda’s death; more than 30 years later, however, that blame is seated in the fact that Stella has created a new life for herself, outside of—or in spite of—her history.  Dr. Tree, in Stella’s mind, comes from this same world—a world that has forgotten what Rosa cannot and is focusing on the aftermath.  Because Rosa cannot remove herself from the present of her time in the concentration camps—she even explains, at one point, that people have three lives, “the life before, the life during, the life after…for me there’s one time only; there’s no after” (58)—she deeply represents those that can, or those that live in the present because they have not experienced what was Rosa’s “during.”

And so Rosa’s means of survival and Rosa’s truth, which are both detached from the actuality of events, dictate that she must object to Dr. Tree’s behaviors to continue living. In Dr. Tree and Stella’s world, Magda is dead and people have moved on.  Because in Rosa’s reality, however, (despite the very small glimmer of new hope Persky brings) Magda is still alive, she cannot move to this world, and therefore must be defensive and abrasive to avoid losing her mechanism for protecting herself.