Osherow searches for that cipher by exploring a range of suffering, from the personal to the historical and cultural. In the poem ''Orders of Infinity'' she visits Treblinka and, in her inability to count the stones or quantify the real loss of the Holocaust, ponders the impossibility of imagining the unborn generations of the victims' descendants, an infinity of lives not lived, ''undreamed daydreams, mute conversations, ungratified indulgences, failed hints . . .''
In Whitethorn, a book of enormous scope and emotional intelligence, Osherow unflinchingly examines the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.