[.ca] The Shawl (ISBN 0679729267)

soul of the holocaust:
I believe the holocast a nightmare - an ugly beast. if Weisel's book " night" be the fictional body of that beast then Shawl is the fictional soul of that beast. This is not first hand description of holocast so it is less bloody but still touching. I liked it for it's literary values and not for it's historical value. even concntration camp kills human beings but does not kill the social barriers that are build inside us from childhood. that idea kind of defeats me. I like the central Character rosa - reminded me of another great novel from Maim Gorky called the "mother"

brutal:
This slender volume consists of two award-winning short stories, both originally published in The New Yorker. In The Shawl (1980), Rosa Lublin is reduced to having her baby, Magda, suck on a shawl, in order to keep her quite enough to escape the notice of concentration camp guards. But when her niece, Stella, takes the shawl the baby is discovered and murdered in a particularly brutal fashion. Rosa (1983) takes place thirty years later in Miami. Rosa has recently destroyed her antique/junk shop in New York City. Now she barely scrapes by in a dingy hotel room, funded by Stella, the two joined to each other by secrets and guilt. She spends much of her time writing letters to Magda, on any pieces of paper she can scrounge. Though Stella says that life is divided into three parts for survivors : "The life before, the life during, the life after", Rosa finds herself eternally stuck in "during." The awful experiences of the past continue to dominate her life. For much of this story she is awaiting a package from Stella, a package that will contain the shawl : "Magda's shawl! Magda's swaddling cloth. Magda's shroud." Stella is a difficult woman, loathing everyone and everything around her. But then, who can blame her ? It is more a testament to the resilience of the human soul in general, than an indictment of this particular character, that more of the survivors of the Holocaust were not so embittered. GRADE : B

Dont read this book unless you have to!!:
Being that I'm enrolled in a Holocaust Literature course there was no recourse but to read this book. I would not recommend this book otherwise lol!! Although this book is about 100 pages, it reads like a 300 page novel. Initially, I couldn't discern Orzick's message. Everything in the first chapter was encoded in metaphor. When our class held discussion I had nothing to contribute besides....huh? Eventually, I sought a book by Joseph Lowin simply entitled "Cynthia Ozick." It broke down the metaphors for me and then suddenly the book made sense. So if this required reading for you, I suggest you read "the shawl" along with Lowin's book. Goodluck!

Amazing:
My English Teacher Recommended this book to me. It was one of thirty books, all of which, she claimed, were essential reading. In the midst of finals, I picked up this book (mostly because it was short) and embarked on one of the best reading experiences of my life. This is an emotional, as well as an intellectual masterpeice. The short story in the beginning, is one of the most powerful I've read. It describes the death of Rosa's baby daughter in a nazi concentration camp. The following novella skips ahead 39 years, and we see rosa debilitated and emotionally broken. The sheer tradgedy of this brough me close to tears several times. On a more cerebral level, this book explored themes such as trauma and recovery, relationships to objects, dreams unexplored, and secret fantasies. On a final note, I was very pleased the Ms. Ozick used a secular Jew as her protaganist, because it created a more extreme conflice, and showed that the Nazi exterminations were NOT about belief.

A haunting piece of Holocaust-inspired fiction:
"The Shawl," the book by Cynthia Ozick, is made up of two linked pieces: a short story (also entitled "The Shawl"), and a novella ("Rosa"). Together, these pieces make up a book that is just about 70 pages long. But despite its brevity, "The Shawl" is a powerful work of fiction. The book tells the story of Rosa Lublin, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. Eventually she settles in Florida. This is a dark, haunting tale with some surreal satiric elements. There are many fascinating touches to "The Shawl." I was intrigued by Ozick's representation of immigrant "English-as-a-second-language" speech patterns. Also noteworthy is Ozick's look at the complexity of linguistic, class, and national identification within the Jewish community. Rosa's problematic relationship-by-mail with a professor of clinical social pathology is also noteworthy, and struck me as comparable to a certain motif in Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved." Rosa, who is bitter, angry, and psychologically broken, is a genuinely haunting and tragic figure. "The Shawl" is not light reading, but it is a memorable and rewarding book. Recommended as a companion text: Art Spiegelman's 2-volume "Maus."