Professor Kratka                                                                                                                                                                  Aaron King

September 24, 2019

Summary Response: The Shawl

            Cynthia Ozick’s novel, The Shawl, contains two short fictional stories concerning Rosa, a Jewish mother, and her infant daughter, Magda. In the first story, Rosa faces the horror of the concentration camps. In the second, she appears as an old woman in Miami, Florida. Throughout the novel, Rosa struggles to accept the past and refuses to categorize herself.

The scene unfolds as Rosa, with Magda concealed in her shawl, is deported to a concentration camp. Magda spends her days in the camp, silently hidden within the folds of the shawl. Then one day, the shawl is stolen and Magda cries. When a guard discovers the crying child, he murders Magda against the electric fence in front of Rosa.

Throughout The Shawl, Ozick uses common themes to portray certain ideas. Ozick makes the story slightly unlikely to distance the text from reality. This becomes apparent when Magda is smuggled into the camp under Rosa’s shawl. As well, her writing style uses as few words as possible to keep the story nonspecific to any historical event. However, she is still able to portray the horror of the concentration camps and the inhumanity of the whole Holocaust. Ozick’s work is also linear, or predictable. The reader knows from the very first lines of the story that Magda will die.

In the second part of the story, Rosa, an old lady now, has crammed her life into a dirty, stuffy apartment in Miami, Florida. Unlike the cold hell of the concentration camp, Miami’s heat consumes Rosa, an opposite climate, but still a living hell for her. At the laundromat, she meets a flirtatious, old man, Simon Persky. Already married and much older than Rosa, Persky amplifies Rosa’s vulnerability. “My Warsaw is not your Warsaw” (19). Although both are Jews from the same city, Rosa alienates herself from him and the rest of the world claiming that she will never fit any categorized identity after what she has experienced. She believes that there is no life after the war, only before and during, another indication of Rosa’s inability to break with her past.

When Rosa receives a letter from a Doctor James Tree concerning a study he is performing on Holocaust survivors, she becomes enraged. She realizes that Mr. Tree, in conducting this analysis, refers to her as a statistic, the precise entity which she refuses to identify with. Ozick uses the study by Doctor James Tree to show how the world views survivors of the Holocaust, not as normal human beings that experienced extreme hardship, but as some lower being that is useful for statistical evidence. This is crassly observed when Dr. Tree notes that Rosa should refer to chapter six in his book about the nature of baboons. Rosa does not want to fit into some larger category. She is a victim, but she wants to be removed from the rest and maintain her unique identity.

The protagonist is unattractive in appearance and thought, so the reader feels no personal attachment to the story. For instance, when Rosa loses a pair of her underwear, it seems completely logical to her that someone, maybe even Persky, stole her underwear and hid it under the sand. Dignity is a subliminal, common theme throughout The Shawl. The lost underwear is like Rosa’s dignity; without it, she feels exposed. It is something that she has lost through past experiences and is looking to regain, but she is looking in the wrong places Rosa believes she has rediscovered her dignity through writing letters to her daughter.

The shawl that Magda used in the camps has been kept through time, and Rosa uses the shawl’s scent as a catalyst to create a fantasy world; Rosa creates an image as if Magda were still alive. In that false reality, Rosa writes letters to her daughter where she provides a logical explanation for her illogical actions. Through these letters, she avoids desecrating the memory of her daughter, everything that she does gains reason, and Rosa can reset her world and recreate a parallel universe with Magda as a flourishing young woman. In reality, however, she cannot accept that her daughter is no longer alive; she is tied down by these ideas, unable to come to terms with the past.

Throughout The Shawl, Rosa attempts to come to terms with the past but is unable to break away from the experiences she has suffered through. This can be observed in most areas of her life. She cannot socialize normally with anyone else, cannot categorize herself as a survivor, and cannot find her dignity, so subsequently she creates a reality where she has the freedom from these ideas. The dignity she feels in this false reality is a dignity that she should feel in normal society, but because she is distanced by the experiences of the Holocaust and the contempt that everyone shows her, she feels the safest and most comfortable staying in that false dimension.

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