The Room on the Roof

533 Words3 Pages
Summarize and discuss the elements of “A Room On The Roof” The story was set in the Middle East and is base on an Israeli woman who hired three Arab workers to build a room on her roof. The story started out with the woman who was sitting on her patio and had a flashback on the time the roof was made. Her husband was away for two months and wasn’t there when the roof was being built. She remembered seeing the Arab workers for the first time and how unclean and poor they looked. Her descriptions of the workers implied that she think they were beneath her. She got closer to one of the workers whose name was Hassan. She started to admire him as a person and how gentle he was with her son Udi. She also found out that Hassan was a very intelligent person because he had once been studying to be a Doctor. As the woman became acquainted with the Arabs, her perception changed towards them. Though she was still on guard, she started to be more welcoming by allowing them to come in her home and have coffee. On Page 86, paragraph one, the woman was reminiscing on that incident and started wondering if these same men could have planted a booby-trapped doll at the gate of a religious school. She was still a little confused of how she left towards them because she had grown up to know of only the negative side of the Arabs. The woman was one day approached by Hassan who was asking her if he could get paid before the job was done in which she refused. The workers then ask to use her washroom and while they were using it, she began to worry and wonder if they were going to kill her. To her surprise she saw Hassan who was heading to a wedding, stepped out in nice clean clothes and looked so well dress. Her perception then immediately changes of how she sees them earlier in the story as being unclean and poor. It would now seem as if she accepts them as her
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