conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The War Of The Rosens about Emma, Reed, Rosen with the genre: Literature & Fiction, World Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In the author's confident fifth story, it's 1965, and 10-year-old cutie-pie Emma Rosen is navigating the rough seas of preadolescence and her temperamental Jewish family in a lower-middle-income Bronx housing project. Her often violent father, Leo, a self-righteous atheist who craves attention, dreamed of being a great novelist but instead owns a candy store; his casual flirtation with a sultry Jamaican widow threatens to blossom into a full-blown affair. Annette, Emma's migraine-plagued doormat of a mother, can barely remember her younger, prettier, idealistic self as she slaves away in the kitchen, the butt of Leo's tantrums. Emma, a budding poet who prays to the Virgin Mary, inspires intense animosity in her 13-year-old sister, May, which burns with the same red-hot intensity as May's infatuation for a classmate with princely blond good looks and manners very different from the Rosens. An old-fashioned coming-of-age tale, the story soon grows dark with crisis. the author (<I>Faithful Rebecca</I>) illuminates the inner lives of young girls on the cusp of womanhood and demonstrates abundant compassion for her often prickly characters. <I>(Sept.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: All rights reserved..)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. <I>(Sept. the author (<I>Faithful Rebecca</I>) illuminates the inner lives of young girls on the cusp of womanhood and demonstrates abundant compassion for her often prickly characters. An old-fashioned coming-of-age tale, the story soon grows dark with crisis. Emma, a budding poet who prays to the Virgin Mary, inspires intense animosity in her 13-year-old sister, May, which burns with the same red-hot intensity as May's infatuation for a classmate with princely blond good looks and manners very different from the Rosens. Annette, Emma's migraine-plagued doormat of a mother, can barely remember her younger, prettier, idealistic self as she slaves away in the kitchen, the butt of Leo's tantrums. Her often violent father, Leo, a self-righteous atheist who craves attention, dreamed of being a great novelist but instead owns a candy store; his casual flirtation with a sultry Jamaican widow threatens to blossom into a full-blown affair.In the author's confident fifth story, it's 1965, and 10-year-old cutie-pie Emma Rosen is navigating the rough seas of preadolescence and her temperamental Jewish family in a lower-middle-income Bronx housing project
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The War Of The Rosens
  With the utmost gratitude to Susan Thames. With deep gratitude, too, to Maureen Brady, Elizabeth Evans, Mary Mackey, Rebecca McClanahan, Valerie Miner, and Gay Walley.
  It's 1965, and the early August air is surprisingly cool, with a faint breeze; the sky, at dusk, rose-tinted. The air feels charged, defiant, as if it's deliberately flouting summer's expectations. Leo Rosen, age 40, inhales deeply and feels his chest expand. Stunning, crisp air fills his lungs.
  Leo holds the hand of his ten-year-old daughter, gawky, blue eyed, freckle-faced Emma, so cute that strangers stop them on the street and say, "She should be on TV." They're waiting to cross the street from the Gun Hill Projects in the northeast Bronx, where they live, to White Plains Road, a major commercial thoroughfare bisecting the Bronx, running beneath an elevated subway line that casts a pervasive, grey shadow below.
  Leo and Emma are heading to the local five-and-dime, a few blocks away, a large store nestled among smaller stores: a pet store, candy store, deli, and shoe store, all displaying their wares in slightly soiled windows.
  The traffic light on the corner of Gun Hill Road is slow to change, infamous in the neighborhood for its lethargy, and Leo glances for a second behind him, not loosening his grip on Emma's hand. His gaze sweeps the buildings and grounds of the Projects, where he and his family have lived since their older daughter's birth, thirteen years before. Although he's well aware that the Projects are not beautiful, this "lower-middle-income development," built in the early 50's and consisting of six tall, factory-like red brick buildings clustered around an occasional chained-off patch of grass, he loves them, and doesn't mind their institutional look.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A new mission in her life will be to exact revenge upon May. If this prevents her from ever becoming a good Jew, the kind of Jew beloved by God who doesn't exist, so be it. This lust for revenge has grasped her tight, and she is powerless in its grip. Like faith must be for those who believe, her desire to wound May is greater than she is.
  Emma smiles at the girl, who, in true Darla fashion, tosses her tightly-wound curls and smiles back, revealing gleaming white, Chicklet-sized teeth, and then stands on her toes and executes a graceful curtsy, so delicately and artfully that Emma wants to grab her and clutch her to her chest and never let go.
  As planned, Shelley, Rachel, and Rosemary are waiting in the lobby for Emma, leaning against the long row of heavily dented metal mailboxes. So awestruck is she by Shelley's costume that Emma forgets all about her stinging eyes and the little girl in the elevator. The true incarnation of a fiery gypsy, Shelley wears a long, ruffled, turquoise skirt and fist-sized hoop earrings that dangle and jangle provocatively from her ears. Bejeweled bracelets adorn her wrists, and strands and strands of multi-colored beads are wrapped around her neck. Setting off her dark skin and eyes are scarlet lipstick and a matching scarf.
  Emma suddenly feels less confident about her own costume. The old black blanket feels nothing like a cape; her pointy hat is slipping off her head; her mother's broom is just that, a cruddy old broom that's falling apart.
  Rachel, standing beside Rosemary, wears a fringed, suede cowgirl's outfit, with pointed boots, a silver pistol holder, and a sharply realistic—at least to Emma—toy gun at her waist. Emma is awestruck by her friend's successful transformation from Jewish schoolgirl to Annie Oakley.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Emma is awestruck by her friend's successful transformation from Jewish schoolgirl to Annie Oakley..
  Rachel, standing beside Rosemary, wears a fringed, suede cowgirl's outfit, with pointed boots, a silver pistol holder, and a sharply realistic—at least to Emma—toy gun at her waist. The old black blanket feels nothing like a cape; her pointy hat is slipping off her head; her mother's broom is just that, a cruddy old broom that's falling apart.
  Emma suddenly feels less confident about her own costume. Setting off her dark skin and eyes are scarlet lipstick and a matching scarf. Bejeweled bracelets adorn her wrists, and strands and strands of multi-colored beads are wrapped around her neck. The true incarnation of a fiery gypsy, Shelley wears a long, ruffled, turquoise skirt and fist-sized hoop earrings that dangle and jangle provocatively from her ears. So awestruck is she by Shelley's costume that Emma forgets all about her stinging eyes and the little girl in the elevator.
  As planned, Shelley, Rachel, and Rosemary are waiting in the lobby for Emma, leaning against the long row of heavily dented metal mailboxes.
  Emma smiles at the girl, who, in true Darla fashion, tosses her tightly-wound curls and smiles back, revealing gleaming white, Chicklet-sized teeth, and then stands on her toes and executes a graceful curtsy, so delicately and artfully that Emma wants to grab her and clutch her to her chest and never let go. Like faith must be for those who believe, her desire to wound May is greater than she is. This lust for revenge has grasped her tight, and she is powerless in its grip. If this prevents her from ever becoming a good Jew, the kind of Jew beloved by God who doesn't exist, so be it.A new mission in her life will be to exact revenge upon May
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Something Emma doesn't know yet, of course, as she stands on the corner of Gun Hill Road, is that one afternoon, a little over a decade away, she'll be sitting at her very own desk in her very own apartment, not downtown in bohemian Greenwich Village, where she always had assumed she would live, but further uptown, in a more affordable neighborhood she'd barely heard of back then, in the very northern reaches of Manhattan'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Something Emma doesn't know yet, of course, as she stands on the corner of Gun Hill Road, is that one afternoon, a little over a decade away, she'll be sitting at her very own desk in her very own apartment, not downtown in bohemian Greenwich Village, where she always had assumed she would live, but further uptown, in a more affordable neighborhood she'd barely heard of back then, in the very northern reaches of Manhattan. Since moving to this neighborhood, she frequently visits the nearby Cloisters, the uptown branch of the Met, looking for inspiration which never fails to come at the sight of the Medieval unicorn tapestries and the museum's lush, cultivated gardens.
  On this particular winter afternoon, she will sit at her second-hand, wooden desk and she'll remember this long-ago, marvelous moment when she was a child in the Bronx.
  Staring out her narrow window at a dusky, shadowy sky not so very different from the sky above her back then, she will begin to compose in her mind a poem about her sister, that brave, sometimes cruel, deeply troubled girl, gone these many years, a poem that is, at its heart, about the complex, mixed-up, sometimes daunting, sometimes exhilarating, natures of both love and faith.
  As it happens, Emma's poem about May will be her first to appear in a magazine, and she will be very proud of it. Leo and Annette, now in their fifties, will also be very proud, so proud that they'll read it aloud to each other many times in their spacious, brightly lit, Upper West Side apartment, which is filled with photographs of both of their daughters—the apartment into which they moved a few years after May's death, shortly after Cookie Coke, living in New Jersey with her accountant husband, sent Leo and Annette a birth announcement of her twin sons, and shortly after Leo acknowledged to himself that he would never finish his novel, and shortly after one of the Sweets Brothers slept with the other's wife, and their opulent candy store closed its doors forever, allowing Leo to pay off his debts.
  But, for the moment, ten-year-old Emma Rosen, who knows nothing of her future, stands still in the bracing air on the corner of Gun Hill Road, aware that she is experiencing something extraordinary, and she finds herself marveling, for the very first time, at all the things that are right, not wrong, with the Rosens.