The Shawl

Throughout The Shawl, Ozick writes in a highly figurative style, drawing frequently on similes, metaphors, and symbolism. This is part of what gives “The Shawl” its parable-like quality, but it’s also a reflection of the importance of imagination to the work as a whole; in different ways, both the Rosa of the short story and the Rosa of the novella are living highly abstract lives inside their own heads. For the Rosa of “The Shawl,” there is a strong sense that this retreat into imagination is a survival mechanism. Although peripherally aware of what’s going on at any given moment, Rosa is largely detached from physical reality, including her own pain, cold, and hunger: “[S]he felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road” (3-4). Ozick implies that Rosa is able to detach herself in this way partly because of the fantasies she nurses surrounding Magda; she “dream[s],” for instance, about handing Magda off to be raised as “one of their babies” (4). In effect, Rosa is able to imagine an alternate reality in which Magda will survive, and despite knowing that reality is almost certainly out of reach, the mere thought of it seems to help Rosa carry on.

By the time “Rosa” takes place, however, this ability to construct alternate realities has become a hindrance, deepening Rosa’s alienation from the world around her. Here, for instance, is how Ozick describes Rosa’s mental state during her nighttime walk around Miami: “[S]he saw everything, but as if out of invention, out of imagination; she was unconnected to anything” (47). The passage echoes Rosa’s sense of “floating” on her way to the concentration camp, but in this case, Rosa has become so “unconnected” to the world around her that reality itself is indistinguishable from fantasy. As a result, she becomes further and further enmeshed in her own paranoid thoughts, imagining that someone has hidden her underwear on the beach and confusing the hotel’s barbed wire with a genuine attempt to imprison her.

Rosa’s detachment from reality is nowhere clearer than in her relationship to language, which, because of its relationship to storytelling, is deeply intertwined with imagination. In “The Shawl,” silence was both a form of self-protection and a form of self-suppression: first Magda and then Rosa use the shawl as a muzzle, ensuring they survive a little longer by stifling their protests. Ozick does not depict Rosa’s relative freedom to speak in “Rosa” as liberating, but rather draws attention to her ongoing difficulties communicating: she struggles to speak English, “cracking her teeth on the poison of [it]” (53), and doesn’t feel that those she tells about her past truly understand what she’s saying. Rosa’s difficulties stem from the fact that she isn’t interested in using language as a way of connecting with others, but rather as a way of distancing herself from the world around her. This is most obvious in the long and effusive letters she writes to her dead daughter, in which she pretends that Magda has survived the camp and gone on to become a doctor or professor. However, the particular language she uses to pen these messages is also significant: the pride Rosa takes in her “literary Polish” (14) reflects her tendency to romanticize her family and background. The fact that her parents spoke Polish rather than Yiddish is—in Rosa’s mind—a sign of their cultural superiority to other Jews, while the particular kind of Polish they spoke—“soft calm voices with the most precise articulation” (68)—is a mark of wealth and education. Although the claims Rosa makes about her family’s class status may very well be true, she frames them in a way that mythologizes them, and thus increases the distance between herself and the “regular” people she is now forced to live amongst.

This shift in the role imagination and language play in Rosa’s life is perhaps best captured in the symbol of Magda’s shawl. Although the meaning of the shawl is complex and variable, it serves in part as a tangible example of imagination’s power. Despite the general realism of the story, Ozick describes the shawl as “magic,” and the plot does seem to bear this assertion out: sucking on the shawl “feeds” Magda, keeping her alive in a way that Ozick never explains or rationalizes (5). In other words, the shawl is a symbol of nourishment that also functions as nourishment on a literal level, and consequently demonstrates the live-giving properties of abstract thought. In “Rosa,” the shawl is life-giving only in a distorted sense: it “restore[s] Magda” (62) to Rosa, but only as (at best) a product of Rosa’s wishful thinking or (at worst) a product of her insanity. The shawl ceases to have any connection to reality at all, becoming entirely intertwined with the world of Rosa’s fantasies and stories.

Questions of how to pay tribute are a central concern in many works about the Holocaust. In The Shawl, these questions overlap to a significant extent with themes of survival and the imagination, as Rosa copes with the trauma of losing her daughter by working obsessively to keep Magda’s memory alive. On a personal level, Rosa’s actions are clearly unhealthy, since they lead her to become more and more alienated from reality and other people. It seems unlikely that The Shawl is advocating for the total erasure of the past, if only because the work itself is a memorial to it.

One approach to remembrance that clearly doesn’t work is Dr. Tree’s. As Ozick portrays them, Dr. Tree and his fellow academics have little interest in people like Rosa except as an object of and a tool to further their research. They unknowingly echo the Nazi dehumanization of Europe’s Jews; Dr. Tree, for instance, sends Rosa a scholarly work with the idea that she might take “special interest” (60) in a study on baboons, seemingly without realizing that in implicitly comparing her to an animal he might cause offense. However, what is most perhaps problematic about Dr. Tree’s work is the jargon-filled and circuitous language it uses. He tells Rosa, for example, that “investigations so far reveal an astonishing generalized minimization during any extended period of stress resulting from incarceration, exposure, and malnutrition” (36). Here and elsewhere, Dr. Tree approaches the subject of the Holocaust in such abstract and roundabout terms that all sense of the physical reality of the event threatens to disappear.

Rosa herself wants nothing to do with this form of remembrance, though she does feel the need to keep memories of the Holocaust alive, not only to herself but to the world. She tells Magda, for instance, that she used to tell stories of the Holocaust to the customers at her antique store: “Nobody knew anything. This amazed me, that nobody remembered what happened only a little while ago” (66). However, what’s most striking about Rosa’s memories of such a pivotal moment in Jewish history is the extent to which Rosa uses it to distance herself from her own Jewishness; in fact, one of the great injustices of the Holocaust, in Rosa’s eyes, was that it made no distinction between her and the “old Jew peasants worn out from their rituals and superstitions” (67). By contrast, the narrative Rosa constructs around her family is one that highlights their assimilation into Polish society and traces their cultural heritage back through Greece and Rome—cultures often held up as the pinnacle of Western civilization. Here, for example, she laments that her own family was more Polish than the working-class gentiles who escaped the Holocaust: “[T]he people in the tramcar were regarded as Poles […] and we were not! They, who couldn’t read one line of Tuwim, never mind Virgil, and my father, who knew nearly the whole first half of the Aeneid by heart” (68-69). The same cultural concerns carry over into the fantasy life Rosa constructs for her dead daughter, whom she imagines as a professor of Greek philosophy and shares her complaints about Dr. Tree with: “In Poland there used to be justice; here they have social theories. Their system inherits almost nothing from the Romans, that’s why” (43).

In other words, Rosa’s denial of Magda’s death is wrapped up in her denial of her Jewish identity; she distances herself and her family from other Jewish victims of the Holocaust in part because it allows her to more easily imagine that Magda might have been spared. Doing so, however, means disavowing aspects of her own history and identity: when Persky asks whether Rosa knows Yiddish, for example, Rosa denies it while “remember[ing] her grandmother’s cradle-croonings […] Unter Reyzls vigele shteyt a klorvays tsigele” (19). Nevertheless, the entry of Persky (a Jewish man who left Europe before the Holocaust) into Rosa’s life offers some hope that Rosa will find a way of relating to her Jewishness that acknowledges the significance of the Holocaust without being entirely defined by it.