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A review by doctorwithoutboundaries
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
4.0
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
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