The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (1989)

A short story and a novella about two Holocaust survivors, a woman and her niece, the first story taking place during the worst of times and the other occurring 30 years later in the United States.

Book Review: The Shawl is an interesting construct. This slender book contains two short works: the eponymous short story describing a horrific event in a camp involving a mother, Rosa, and her niece Stella. The subsequent novella, Rosa, continues the now more-distant relationship between the two in latter day America, when the effects of the past overshadow the present. So much Holocaust literature is based on memoir, eyewitness, reportage, trying to express the horror of the time, to make it real, to bear witness to what happened, to sound the warning of history. The stories in The Shawl take it another step, the intelligent sentences and clever language show Ozick creating art: "someone who is already a floating angel," "a pocket mirror of a face," "an elfin tombstone," "the duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole," "her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers," "the sunheat murmured of another life," "the whole of Magda traveled through loftiness." There is no crime in creating art from horror, if it was illegal we'd never have had the immense brilliance of Toni Morrison. The purpose of art is to achieve meaning (even if just that all is absurd), to help show how we're located in our troubled lives. Here I felt a distance. This is horror at a remove, horror seen through glass, seen through beautiful sentences. Ozick isn't trying to accomplish the "make it real" of memoir and reportage, this isn't the work of someone who lived through the experience. This is someone trying to create literary fiction, to bring the multi-faceted lens of art to bear on tragic events. But I couldn't find what Ozick's art adds to what we've already read in Holocaust literature, what new thing it says about those times. I liked how the two stories (as in the graphic novel Maus) show the effects of the horrors on lives today, even unto the next generation. Lovely, creative, cinematic writing, muscular word choice ("her knees were tumors on sticks"), but what is the author saying about it? That it was horrible, that there were lingering effects, an attempt to fix blame ("took the shawl away and made Magda die"), that privation breeds resentment, that teenagers are selfish, that the instinct for self-preservation is stronger than maternal instinct. The Shawl is well written and beautifully done, but I felt insulated from the feelings articulated. At the key moment of "The Shawl" Rosa is analytical, logical, unhindered by emotion. This is not the story we heard when young. I'll leave it to the readers of other Holocaust writing to determine the verisimilitude of concealing a 15-month old child in a concentration camp. Well written, well done, intelligent, but for me The Shawl didn't create an emotional connection to the fiction.  [3½★]