Connections Between: The Shawl & When the Emperor was Divine

            
         
               After reading the two books “The Shawl” and “When the Emperor was Divine” I was able to make some connections between the two novels. Both novels show the hardship and the emotional damage that characters face with being discriminated and put in places they don’t belong. In the novel “When the Emperor was Divine” the characters suffered for three years in internment camps that they were sent to during the war in the 1940’s. When they returned from the camps, they experienced long lasting changes in their personality, appearance, and in life. While in the book “The shawl” similar changes took place. For instance, much distress comes upon Rosa as well from being placed in a death march during the holocaust. Both novels show characters changes and struggles while being in terrorizing conditions.

 In the novel “The Shawl” Rosa deals with much torture, pain and suffering. When she survives the camps and try to return to living a normal life she can’t move on from what she has faced. Emotionally, Rosa is damaged from the experiences that she has faced just like the woman in “When the Emperor was divine”. The woman who was also a victim of a horrible event that was more like genocide caused much emotional and physical damage.  The woman became very depressed and she was not as strong as she was in the beginning of the book.

Even though both characters in both novels face a sense of change, they both change in completely different ways. For example, Rosa cannot let go of what happened to her. She states, “Only Nazis catch innocent people behind barbed wire.” When Rosa seen the barbed wire by the beach at the hotel she immediately thought of her painful past. In “When the Emperor was Divine” the woman returns from being in internment camps for four years, her life back home is not the same. Emotionally the woman seems a little damaged but willing to move on from what she has faced.

In both novels, the author makes the reader get a sense of the terrible events that each character faces and how they deal with the situation. After reading both books I feel like I can’t fully empathize with what people really went through in these tragic events, but I can sort of understand the situations they faced.