Ozick's literary style (dense, allusive, poetic) makes reading her always a pleasure. I first read "The Shawl" ("The Shawl," short story; "Rosa" novella) when it first appeared in 1984, and have returned to it several times in the years since. The stories, better read as a single narrative, are about Rosa, a Holocaust survivor, in mourning for over thirty years (the narrative takes place in 1977) for her dead parents, siblings, and infant child, who the Nazis discovered and threw against the camp's electric fence. The story is marred somewhat by its brevity (69 pages) and underdevelopment, and the protagonist's self-torment, which, after awhile becomes a bit tedious to read. But Ozick's prose, as usual, soars, the suppleness of the language making up for the story's unrelenting bleakness.