“Snow” is a short and beautiful story about developing
love. It describes how two people come together in the United States from cultures at
opposite ends of the world—Vietnam and Poland. Both major characters have been displaced
from their native countries; both have lost their fathers; and both share a common fear
of snow (which nevertheless unites them). Miss Giàu had lived in Vietnam, a tropical
country, and first encounters snow in St. Louis after moving to the United States. She
fears snow, she says, because when it first fell it
“came so quietly and everything was underneath
it, like this white surface was the real earth and everything had died … and was buried”
(paragraph 49).
Cohen has
similar negative feelings about snow because after leaving Warsaw in 1939 he associated
snow with the death of his father during the Holocaust. There are many other reasons for
which men and women are drawn to each other, but in this story the similar attitudes
toward snow seem to be sufficient to draw the two together despite the differences in
age between Cohen and Miss Giàu.
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