After she smashed up her antique store in New York, Rosa moves to Florida to live a quiet life financed by her niece, Stella. Rosa writes to Stella in English, which is difficult for her because she is a Polish Jew who immigrated to America after the Second World War. Her mother-tongue, Polish, is reserved for her letters to her daughter Magda. One day, Rosa piles her clothes into a cart and walks to the Laundromat. She makes the acquaintance of Simon Persky, a seventy-year-old well-off man who takes an interest in her. Rosa reluctantly has tea with him in a small restaurant, and leaves as fast as she can. Upon her return, she finds two letters and a package from Stella. Rosa is overjoyed; she had been wanted Stella to send Magda's shawl to her for the longest time, and it seemed that Stella had finally listened. In reality, Magda died as a baby, but Rosa ignores this reality and writes letters to a daughter that does not exist. She reads Stella's letter with haughty disdain, and does not immediately open the package that must contain Magda's shawl because she wants her mood to be pleasant beforehand. The second letter that came in is from a researcher, Dr. Tree, who wants to interview Rosa and see if her experience in Nazi-occupied Poland had any emotional or mental effect on her. Rosa loathes this man and everything he represents; she does not want to be thought of as a "refugee" or a "survivor," but a "human being." Angry and helpless, Rosa goes for a walk. One of her pairs of underwear is missing from her laundry basket, and she is sure that Persky has pocketed it. This assumption makes her feel defiled and impure, which contrasts her perception of herself as a mother. She cannot find the underwear anywhere. On her way back, she wanders into a restricted area of a fancy hotel and mocks a gay couple when they refuse to help her leave. The manager of the hotel, also Jewish, asks her to leave politely after she accosts him and asks him if the researcher Dr. Tree is staying at the hotel. After a heated exchange, Rosa lashes out at him for being fortunate enough not to experience what she endured at the hands of the Nazis. In her letters to Magda, Rosa admits that she was sexually assaulted by a SS officer, but that Magda's father was a respectable Polish man named Andrzej. When Rosa finally comes back to the hotel, she finds Persky there. He comes up for tea, and she confidently tells him to open the box in which Magda's shawl lies, hoping it will show him who she really is: a mother. When he opens it, however, it is just a book sent by Dr. Tree, who wants Rosa to read it and agree to an interview with him. Rosa is shocked, and she hurls the book onto the table and dismisses Persky hastily. The next morning, Rosa finds her missing underwear rolled up inside a towel. Another package arrives, and this time it carries Magda's shawl. She calls Stella on the phone, who urges her to abandon this devotion to a dead child and get a life. Rosa responds and says "my life was stolen." She drapes the shawl over the telephone; this time, the mere sight of it was not enough to 'animate' her memories of Magda, but, as the minutes pass, she can visualize the girl with her father's face. The phone rings again, and announces that Persky has come to the hotel lobby to see her. The vision of Magda is dispelled.