Customer Reviews

The Shawl

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Shawl," the book by Cynthia Ozick, is made up of two linked pieces: a short story (also entitled "The Shawl"), and a novella ("Rosa"). Together, these pieces make up a book that is just about 70 pages long. But despite its brevity, "The Shawl" is a powerful work of fiction.

The book tells the story of Rosa Lublin, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. Eventually she settles in Florida. This is a dark, haunting tale with some surreal satiric elements.

There are many fascinating touches to "The Shawl." I was intrigued by Ozick's representation of immigrant "English-as-a-second-language" speech patterns. Also noteworthy is Ozick's look at the complexity of linguistic, class, and national identification within the Jewish community. Rosa's problematic relationship-by-mail with a professor of clinical social pathology is also noteworthy, and struck me as comparable to a certain motif in Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved."

Rosa, who is bitter, angry, and psychologically broken, is a genuinely haunting and tragic figure. "The Shawl" is not light reading, but it is a memorable and rewarding book. Recommended as a companion text: Art Spiegelman's 2-volume "Maus."

The Shawl is a hauntingly beautiful story and novella of a woman, Rosa, who watches her baby daughter, Magda, die at the hands of a concentration camp guard during the holocaust. Told in lyrical prose, Ms. Ozick captivates us with the symbol of the shawl representing everything that Rosa lost during the war. The shawl is what she hid her daughter Magda in at the concentration camp so that Magda wouldn't be thrown into the gas chambers. But, her evil niece Stella (who is with Rosa and Magda at the concentration camp) steals the shawl from the baby one night. The baby is then found and killed by a guard.

The rest of the story tells of Rosa's life 39 years later as she has taken residence in a dumpy hotel room in Florida that evil Stella (who now resides in New York) pays for. Here, Rosa lives day to day in a sort of mental fit, deluding herself that Magda is still a live, a beautiful lioness, a doctor married to a doctor, living in a gorgeous house in New York. Amid open sardine cans and half eaten eggs, Rosa writes letters to this daughter.

Toward the end of the novella, Rosa finally receives a box with the shawl in it which Stella has reluctantly sent to her. "Get on with your life; join a club; put on your bathing suit!" Stella tells her in a letter attached to the shawl. But, all that Rosa cares about is breathing in the shawl, Magda.

Overall, this was certainly one of the greatest pieces of writing I've ever had the chance to read. Cynthia Ozick knows her subject, is deeply deeply in tune with her characters and touches us with all that they feel and do.

I look forward to reading more of her work. She is a truly gifted writer who has much to offer the world.

Both stories in this brief book ("The Shawl" and "Rosa") are about the same women, who sees her baby killed in the camps and thirty years later is haunted by her memory. "The Shawl" (the first story) is, I think, the best short story in the English language (it dwarfs Carver and Cheever in scope, has deeper moral thrust than O'Conner and in a few pages evokes the Holocaust as much as Primo Levi was able to do in his eloquent long works). In a few words: Read this story and you will be changed. On the other hand, "Rosa" (a novella) is drawn out and, though powerful, more nuanced and subtle than its predecessor. Although usually good things, these elements work against the story (especially if read in succession) - "The Shawl"'s power is its unwillingness to compromise anything whereas "Rosa" seems to err a bit on the long side. It's almost tempting to give the stories entirely different ratings but the "10" of "The Shawl" so far eclipses any "9" or "8" I would give "Rosa" that I think it unfair to lower the status of the better story. This work is not nice or easy and doesn't attempt any of the catharsis some Holocaust Fiction ludicrously includes. It is hard to read (and should be) because both works are more or less a statement about our own humanity (or inhumanity). The prose itself is wonderfully easy, but the depth of emotion Ozick strikes makes this a very difficult 69 pages. Read it and you too will "never forget".

I haven't read the novella, so I probably shouldn't write a review of this book. But I read the short story "The Shawl" last night in a different collection of short stories and couldn't get up after I had read it. If the novella is even half as powerful as the title story, this book would obviously qualify as a must-read for any literate person.

In Ozick's book she presents a truly phenomenal treatise on the life of a retired holocaust survivor. Ozick paints an incredible graphic picture of what Miami looks like to one who has survived a stint in a Nazi concentration camp. The story starts with a classic example of Nazi savagery, showing how the protagonist had a daughter in the camp, and how that daughter was treated with gratuitous violence and horror.

Ozick clearly portrays a women with a mind that has been tortured so badly, that she feels that everything is deeply negative. The vision is of one whose eyes have been colored with blood colored glasses, and the dust and ash of burnt bodies. The story leads the reader through this emotional and psychic horror show, that runs through the protagonist's head.

For a bit of additional irony, Ozick reveals the story as her character searches the city for a lost pair of underwear. This personal item is so important to her, that she exerts more energy in the search for that, than she does in the continuation of life. Her perspective is that the Nazi's "stole her life." And for so many, this was indeed the case. Whether they survived or not, they had their lives stolen from them.

Through this prism Ozick reveals the way the mind is deeply and permanently affected by the exposure to a period of horror; that no human being should ever have to endure. As a result, the experience always leaves an impression on the mind which cannot be shirked, no matter how hard a survivor tries, the memory of the ugliness and the near death conditions never completely leaves their memory or present day life.

The book is highly recommended for those interested in the affect that being in a concentration camp exerts on the human mind. It also is a purely exquisite tale of human suffering.

Is there a better writer out there? I cannot imagine one. Ozick is a powerful writer -- a magician, in the truest sense of the word. This short book is actually two long stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker. Both segments contain mostly the same people, but at 40 years distance. In the first part, Stella and Rosa, along with Rosa's baby, are force marched and then imprisoned as Jews by the [...]. Through a sort of fantasy, the baby is kept alive for a period of time through the use of the shawl mentioned in the title. 40 years later, Rosa is spiritually still in the camp, though she lives in Miami Beach. When asked about her life, she says it was stolen from her. I won't say anything else except to say that this is so affecting that you won't be able to read it unmoved. I highly recommend this book.

This short work telling of the death of a child in the Shoah, and the subsequent life- destroying effect on the mother of the child is a disturbing and moving one. The symbolic 'shawl' connects the two parts of the work. It had helped keep baby Magda alive in a concentration camp, , and fifty years later the Mother Rosa holds on to as if it contained within it the life of her dead baby. Ozick's writing is brilliant especially in her depiction of the aging survivors in Miami. A note of hope enters in the figure of an elderly suitor Persky who attempts to woo Rosa back to a life of her own. But as Ozick makes painfully clear the message of Rosa's life is that what has been most loved in the past is far more real than any present or future can be.

Cynthia Ozick, a fiction writer, clearly depicts the affects of the Holocaust on one woman, Rosa Lublin. Ozick uses an accumulation of two of her short stories, one being "The Shawl," and the other being, "Rosa." In "The Shawl," Rosa witnessed the murder of her baby daughter, Magda, while at the hands of the malicious concentration camp guards. Magda was thrust towards an electric fence the first time that she was seen by a Nazi guard. Rosa had done an efficient job of hiding Magda until Rosa's neice, Stella, stole Magda's "magical shawl" for her own comfort, thus wielding Magda to the guards. The tragic death of Magda changes the course of Rosa's life forever; long after the Holocaust is over. There is a time where Rosa tells the way that life goes... "there's life before, life during, and life after-Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays." For Rosa, Hitler's reign during the Holocaust is "during." "The Shawl" follows "Rosa". In this sequel, Rosa is now living in Florida, "a hellish place," where she is meagerly financially supported by Stella. Stella lives in New York; both women live alone. The reason for their separation stems to the time when Rosa flipped out and completely destroyed her shop in Brooklyn; for she would have been placed in a mental rehabilitation center, had she not left New York immediately. Rosa, 59, continues to agonize over the loss of Magda, even after nearly 30 years. Everyday, she writes letters to Magda in "the most literary Polish," while she can only communicate with Stella in English. Unable to afford simple things such as paper, Rosa either finds blank sheets in the "hotel" lobby where she is staying or she finds envelopes which she delicately unfolds to form squares of paper, or, as she puts it, "the fresh face of a new letter." Rosa's life then changes when she encounters a wealthy man by the name of Mr. Persky. Persky is a rather obvious flirt in their chance meeting. Does anything happen between Rosa and Persky?

Consisting of a story and a novella, THE SHAWL takes on large subjects. Three characters are central to both the story and the novella: A mother, Rosa, her niece, Stella, and her daughter, Magda. The shawl of the title figures prominently in both the story and the novella.

In the story, "The Shawl", Rosa is in her early twenties, Stella is fourteen, and Magda is a baby. They are in a concentration camp. The story is only eight pages long, but dense with emotion. If it were much longer, I think the reader might become numb. As it is, it is near perfect, if a story about something so horrifying can be said to be perfect. The story is much anthologized, including in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (which is a great collection of short stories if you are at all hesitant about investing solely in Ozick). For fear of spoiling it, my only further comment is that it is well worth the effort to find and read it.

In the novella, "Rosa", Rosa is an old woman living alone in Florida in a broken down "hotel" (the quotes are hers). Her social life consists primarily of writing letters to Stella (in English) and to Magda (in Polish). Her connections to the broader world are tenuous at best.

Her routine of solitude is broken one day when she takes her filthy sheets and clothes to the laundromat. There she meets Simon Persky, an old Jew who also happens to be from Warsaw. He left in 1920. Through Rosa's interaction with Persky and another old man she meets who did not experience the Holocaust, Ozick explores the attitudes of "survivors", a term Rosa finds dehumanizing, toward fellow Jews who were not there.

Persky, whether through lust, romanticism, benevolence, or boredom, spends the novella trying to entice Rosa to go on a date with him. He is an interesting character, and adds some light to an otherwise bleak novella. He has somewhat the same effect on Rosa's life.

Rosa carries horrible memories of the Holocaust, certainly, but part of what she laments is her loss of status. Due to the evils perpetrated by the Nazis, she went from somebody to nobody. First her family (a family of importance) was stripped of its privilege, then they all were stripped of their humanity. Rosa feels she has never been able to regain, in the eyes of the world, her humanness.

This theme is repeated throughout the novella. For instance, Rosa is indignant when a psychologist who writes to her refers to her as a "survivor". To Rosa, it is another category that sets her off as an outsider, a less than. Likewise, barbed wire she encounters in America is a reminder that she is less than, that others, even other Jews, consider her to be "riff raff" to be kept separate and apart. But her characterizations are not the only possible ones, as Persky reminds her.

Her tragedy, in the novella, is that she believes she cannot retrieve her past status as a full, complete human being. Who can argue? So she creates an alternate present, where she yearns for the past. She is a sympathetic character, but a frustrating one as well. I wanted her, as Persky urges, to forget a little, even though I know this probably asks too much. I want her to have her reprieve.

The story and novella are both quite moving, in different ways, and provide brilliant insight into the Holocaust and its continuing effects. I highly recommend Ozick as a writer and THE SHAWL as a book.

"The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick actually contains two stories. i.e. "The Shawl", and "Rosa". In "The Shawl", readers are taken into the nightmare of the Holocaust as experienced by Rosa, her infant daughter Magda, and Rosa's niece Stella. Rosa uses a shawl to hide her infant from detection and almost certain death, but this arouses Stella's resentment and leads to an act that proves tragic.

In "Rosa", the story moves forward 30 years - Rosa is now a Holocaust survivor who resides in Miami, but whose past very much haunts her present. She is still clinging on to the shawl and misses her past life - the life she had before the Holocaust. There is so much anger and pain here, that one cannot help but be emotionally affected as the reader is drawn into Rosa's anguish.

Though a short novel, Rosa's story is a compelling addition to Holocaust literature.