TV Reviews : ‘Rose White’ Confronts Her Jewish Heritage

“Hallmark Hall of Fame,” TV’s perennial class act, lives up to its reputation with “Miss Rose White” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39), a sensitive rendering of Barbara Lebow’s delicate Off-Broadway play “A Shayna Maidel.”

Written with care by Anna Sandor and beautifully filmed in a post-World War II New York setting, it bears Emmy Award-winning director Joseph Sargent’s intelligent stamp and boasts a top-flight cast, including Kyra Sedgwick, Amanda Plummer, Maximilian Schell and Maureen Stapleton.

Rose White (Sedgwick) is young and pretty, her clothes are ‘40s chic, and she’s just been appointed second assistant buyer trainee at Macy’s. Brooklyn accent and all, Rose is ready to make good in the land of opportunity.

Her all-American image is based on shaky ground, however. She doesn’t let herself think of her mother and older sister Luisa, left behind 17 years before when she and her father emigrated from Poland. The family was to be reunited when Luisa had recovered from illness. Instead, the two were lost to the Nazi camps.

Now, word comes that Luisa survived. But her arrival from Poland precipitates as much pain as joy. Rose must confront her past and her neatly compartmentalized present. Her father (Schell), a rigid authoritarian, is faced with the price of his own pride.

Sedgwick projects a touching, girlish vulnerability beneath her modern-woman facade. Plummer as Luisa is superb. Her face, sharply angled and plain, reflects a complexity of emotions; she convincingly carries her character’s evolution from shattered victim and angry accuser to a woman finding life and even humor again.

Stapleton hasn’t much to do but project warmth and grandmotherly concern, and Schell’s stiff-necked patriarch becomes trying, but there’s nothing cheap along the way to the inevitable happy ending, or about the film’s fundamental celebration of family.