This book/novella is actually two short stories invlolving the same two characters at different points in their life. The first story is set during the Holocaust, the second is after.
Very vivid and poetic throughout, but I sure wish it had lasted longer!

This novella is beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s an insight into one woman’s experience in the holocaust, and what remains of her life following being freed. It’s short, but impactful.

6 Million people were murdered in the Holocaust.

That is more than three times the number of all the people who currently live in my Mid-Western city of Cincinnati, OH. It is hard for me to imagine what this number of murdered people actually encompasses. It's also difficult to think of the survivors, to hear and acknowledge their stories and to know that there is not enough empathy in the world for people who have experienced the trauma of the Holocaust.

Cynthia Ozick's two short stories, The Shawl and Rosa are presented in this collection. The book is 70 pages long. In The Shawl, we hear the Holocaust story of Rosa. Rosa is a young mother who is being marched from the Ghetto to a prison camp. Marching with her are her 14 year old niece, Stella, and her infant daughter, Magda. Magda is hidden in a shawl, wrapped around Rosa's chest like a sling. The shawl is instilled with some magical realism powers, meaning that as long as Magda has the shawl, she can survive. They are all starving and experiencing unbelievably horrific conditions. The story ends tragically.

The second story, Rosa, was written a few years later. Rosa is now in her 50's, filled with grief, fury, rage. She is an American Immigrant, and has been living in NYC. The story picks up with her move to Florida to a retirement apartment, where she writes daily letters to Magda and Stella and is barely able to leave her apartment. She has tried to share her story with other Jews in NYC, with Stella, and in this story with a man named Persky who is compassionate and friendly with Rosa. No one can understand her, though. Stella, wants her to forget and get over it, already! Her customers in NYC have only the vaguest idea of things that happened in the Holocaust and don't really want to hear about them. And Persky, though compassionate, was safe in the US at the time.

What happens when a human has a traumatic experience that very few others can relate with? Although it is safe to say that each human experience is unique, many would react as Rosa is. With a deep mistrust of humans, with grief, with rage, with suspicion, with self-loathing. Humans need to share their stories in order to connect to the rest of humanity. Ironically, there is a scientist who is trying to connect with Rosa and hear her story, but she does not really understand and feels that she is just a "number" to him due to his clinical and methodical ways of contacting her, so she does not engage. Much more is needed.

A lot of reviews speak about Rosa's actions, how she loses her underpants at the laundry and goes searching for them. Reviews about what her walk through nighttime Miami symbolizes. What sticks with me is her need to connect with other humans. After getting locked into a beach that is surrounded with a fence with barbed-wire on top to keep non-guests out, Rosa says to the manager:
"Mister, you got barbed wire by your beach.
"Are you a guest here?
"I'm someplace else.
"Then it's none of your business, is it?
"You got barbed wire.
"It keeps out the riffraff.
"In America, it's no place for barbed wire on top of fences......Only Nazis catch innocent people behind barbed wire........
"My name is Finkelstein.
"Then you should know better!...A shame, A Finkelstein, like you.

Humans need to share their stories in order to connect to the rest of humanity, and Rosa cannot connect.

Overall, the writing in The Shawl and in Rosa came across as a bit dream-like and floaty with a definite feel of madness to it. Deserved madness. The writing is very strong in this way, and I felt it to be true to the situation of a survivor. Recommended for those who are interested in holocaust literature, or the shared human experience. Definitely, a tough and sad read.

I found this to be kind of on the boring side. Don’t remember when I actually started to read this, just remember the joy of finally being done with the book. Maybe reading a sad book during the pandemic wasn’t the greatest thing to do.

5/5⭐️
This book was poetic, beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. Two short stories depicting the horrors during and after the holocaust. The author uses eloquent prose, symbolism and allusion to help the reader understand the darkness and different experiences of people who survived. Highly recommend this short read

I love browsing around museums and art galleries, and occasionally I’ll come upon a heretofore unseen painting that’ll startle me. Some element in it will seem misplaced, a symbol as inexplicable as magic that stands out in a barren setting. Almost always, these paintings come with the least amount of history or context, leaving me confused and at a loss to comprehend the image before me. Then, realising the futility of trying to analyse it, I let my imagination take the lead, conjuring a backstory for the piece... I’ve been thinking about The Shawl a lot in the past few days and it’s these paintings that have kept coming back to me. Partly, this is because it feels like the story was extrapolated in reverse order. Now it turns out that my intuition was right; Cynthia Ozick did build the story around the ending, which she admits here.

The Shawl follows three generations of women—Rosa, Stella, and Magda—as they are ushered towards a concentration camp. Magda, the infant, survives by the grace of a shawl that miraculously protects and sustains her for three days. One of the starred reviews in my copy talks about the “unimaginable horror” behind this story, referring to the Holocaust, of course. But that assessment utterly misses what makes this story powerful. The Shawl is historical fiction that doesn’t depend on tragedy to work. The tragedy simply provides the pivots around which Ozick spins an exquisite yarn of motifs and imagery.

Just look at how simply yet inventively she describes Stella’s emaciated legs: “Her knees were tumors on sticks” and her inspired comparison of Rosa’s dried up mammary glands to “dead volcano”s. Then we have the blue eyes and golden hair of Magda, who Stella decries as “Aryan”; what that means is left unsaid, encouraging the reader to further infer... The whole thing is an excellent example of in medias res. I especially like that Ozick somehow made her omniscient narrator disappear, so that it felt very much as if I was witnessing events from inside Rosa’s mind, obviously intended to bias the reader. And Ozick does this with memorable metaphors and evocative language, skimping on historical details and facts but not on themes, and the result is art at its purest.

The second story, Rosa, picks up thirty years later, with the titular character as just another Polish immigrant in America. It has possibly the best description of Florida: “It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.” Sorry, Florida, but you know it’s true. While I applaud its realistic depiction of confabulation, I didn’t like this longer story as much as I did the first. There’s interesting commentary on survival and prejudice, but it’s delivered sans subtlety. It’s not a bad story—just very different from The Shawl. It lacks the creativity and flair that make the latter so haunting.

TL;DR
The Shawl - 5/5
Rosa - 3.5/5