THE SHAWL

Short Story by Cynthia Ozick, 1980

Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" (1980) is a tiny masterpiece of Holocaust literature. In seven pages Ozick evokes the horror and brutality of the Holocaust and relates a powerful narrative of death and survival. Originally published as a separate story in the New Yorker, it was followed by a sequel, "Rosa," which takes up the story 30 years later. The two stories have been published together in book form under the title The Shawl (1989). Written in a dense and highly metaphoric style, "The Shawl" resembles a prose poem more than a straightforward narrative. It centers around three characters—a mother (Rosa), her infant daughter (Magda), and her 14-year-old niece (Stella)—who are trapped in "a place without pity," an unnamed concentration camp. During the opening passages the characters are marching along a road, presumably part of a march toward a death camp. Rosa is cradling her infant daughter in a shawl that will become the central symbol of the story. We learn that it is on account of this "magic" shawl that Magda has managed to survive this long: the Nazis would have taken the girl away had she not been concealed. Magda also sucks on the shawl for comfort, the only form of nourishment available now that Rosa's breasts no longer provide sufficient milk. Moreover, the shawl becomes an animate creature in Magda's eyes, making her laugh when it moves about in the wind. Stella, who has become so emaciated that her knees are described as "tumors on sticks," is jealous of her baby cousin and yearns to be rocked to sleep in the shawl herself. The shawl is thus depicted as a necessary, but inherently limited, resource for navigating the concentration camp universe.

The scene shifts seamlessly from the road to the camp. The baby girl, Magda, has strayed from the barracks into the roll-call arena where, suddenly exposed to the camp guards, she cries out for her mother. Rosa is faced with a critical dilemma: should she go out to grab Magda, who will continue to cry until the shawl is recovered, or should she find the shawl first and allow Magda to remain exposed in the meantime? Rosa decides to find the shawl first and quickly discovers it covering the sleeping Stella. In the story's only words of dialogue, spoken in an undefined "afterward," Stella callously accounts for her act of theft: "I was cold." Although Rosa recovers the shawl, it is too late to save the screaming Magda. As Rosa watches, Magda is lifted onto the shoulder of a Nazi guard and hurled against the electrified fence. In order to squelch her cries, Rosa stuffs the shawl into her own mouth and tastes "the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda's shawl." Once again the shawl acts as a source of comfort and protection, a reminder of the tenderness that has been stamped out.

Throughout the story Ozick's style works by indirection. Rather than identifying the barracks as part of a Nazi concentration camp, she describes the "ash-stippled wind" and the "stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke." Rather than identifying the figure that hurls Magda against the fence as a Nazi guard, Ozick writes that Magda was "riding someone's shoulder" and that "above the shoulder a helmet glinted." As a result of this style, the reader is denied access to the omniscient perspective generally afforded by a third-person narrative. In place of such a perspective, the reader is situated amidst a series of experiences so horrifying that they resist the categories of conventional language. Ozick's extensive use of figurative language—Magda's eyes are called "blue tigers," her legs are called "scribbling pencils"—suggests the desperate operations of a mind (both Rosa's and that of the implied narrator) striving to make sense of a bleak world. When Magda lets out her first scream in the roll-call arena, Rosa responds with "fearful joy": fear because recrimination is imminent, joy because Magda's silenced voice has finally been released. In a similar way Ozick's story lets out a lyrical outpouring that bears witness to unmitigated suffering.