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Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel*, an affecting and bittersweet story, beautifully plays off various sources of dramatic tension.  Rose Weiss is a Jewish woman in her twenties, who at the age of four came to America from Poland with her father, years before Hitler’s rise to power.  Her mother and older sister, Lusia, stayed behind, initially because of Lusia’s illness and then because of the father’s procrastinations in bringing them to the U.S.  After September of 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, it was too late for them to leave.  Through six years of war, occupation, and the Holocaust Luisa managed to survive.  Now it is 1946, and Lusia is finally coming to join her father and Rose in New York City.

The "Americanized", independent-minded Rose and the emotionally-scarred survivor Lusia present the audience with volcanic contrasts.  Rose, with makeup, jewelry, and typical American postwar optimism is somewhat embarrassed by Lusia's old world ways, broken English, concentration camp tattoo, and the tragic sense that comes from living a nightmare.  There is tension in all directions, as Rose deals with what she sees as Lusia's oddities, Lusia confronts her father’s life and her mother's death, and her father grapples with the consequences of his earlier decisions and "how things might have been."  But ultimately Lebow’s tale transcends into a chronicle of understanding and empathy, of growing up and moving on, and of a family rising from the ashes.