The Shawl

"One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen."

The above passage develops the symbolism surrounding the shawl, which up until this point has served simply as a swaddling cloth and carrying sling for Magda. As Rosa loses the ability to breastfeed, the shawl takes on a newer and more life-giving role as something for Magda to “milk.” It becomes associated with nourishment and survival, extending Magda’s life and finally saving Rosa’s when she uses it to silence her screams at the story’s end. The passage also draws together imagery of life and death in a way that emphasizes the blurriness of the lines separating the two; Ozick, for instance, describes Magda’s tooth—typically a sign of growth and development—as a “tombstone."

"On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda’s face. ‘Aryan,’ Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said ‘Aryan,’ it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said ‘Let us devour her."

Besides introducing the motif of cannibalism, which Ozick will use to explore the ways in which cruelty warps its victims’ sense of humanity, the above passage provides an early hint to Magda’s origins. Although Rosa will later insist that Magda’s father came from a well-to-do Jewish family very much like her own, it gradually becomes clear that Magda was likely conceived via rape, and that her father was an S.S. officer: Rosa may consciously refuse to consider this possibility, but she also feels “a little suspicious of Magda” at times, because “[t]he other strain [that ran in her] was ghostly, even dangerous” (65). Meanwhile, Stella’s insistence that Magda is half “Aryan” is an indication of her unwillingness or even inability to indulge in the same kinds of fantasies that Rosa does, which increasingly becomes a source of tension between the two women.

"They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella’s bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs."

As cruel as Stella’s actions are in stealing the shawl from Magda, Ozick also describes Rosa’s sense of compassion as having been “annihilated” by life in the camp. The prisoners’ struggle to survive, coupled with their brutal treatment by their captors, creates an environment in which altruism is difficult or even dangerous to practice. The threat of cannibalism, which Ozick raises repeatedly in the story, is a particularly dramatic example of this, since it involves seeing a fellow human (in this case Magda) as nothing but fuel for one’s own survival. For Ozick, this is part of the tragedy of the Holocaust: those who physically survive may do so at the expense of their own humanity.

"Magda’s eyes were always clear and tearless. She watched like a tiger. She guarded her shawl."

More even than Rosa’s, Magda’s spirit seems largely unaffected by her outward circumstances. Although Magda is by far the most physically vulnerable and helpless of the story’s characters, Ozick likens her more than once to fierce, powerful animals—in this case, a tiger—to indicate the intensity of her will to survive. Although the most obvious explanation for Magda’s composure is that, as a toddler, she simply doesn’t understand what’s happening, it gives her eventual murder added significance: Magda’s death also marks a total loss of hope for Rosa.

"Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosa’s two palms, her fingers were on fire, she was astonished, febrile: Magda in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling. Ever since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples, ever since Magda’s last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute."

Like so much else in “The Shawl,” Magda’s muteness is heavily symbolic. The fact that she learns to stay quiet is all that prevents her from being killed the moment her mother arrives at the concentration camp. A person who remains silent and obedient in the face of a murderous regime may survive longer than someone who speaks out. However, remaining silent in those circumstances carries with it its own costs. Likewise, there’s something strange and perhaps even unnatural about a baby that no longer cries when it’s hungry, as though it no longer cares about its own survival. For that reason, Magda’s screams in this passage are a bittersweet moment: they secure her own death, but they also symbolize her refusal to tolerate her circumstances any longer, and the “fearful joy” Rosa feels likely has as much to do with that as it does with the reassurance that her daughter is in fact developing like any other child.

"[S]o she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried."

In the final lines of “The Shawl,” Rosa watches as her infant daughter is thrown into the electric fence surrounding the concentration camp. Despite her horror, Rosa realizes that she’ll be shot if she screams, so she uses Magda’s shawl to muffle her own cries. By having Rosa do so, Ozick both expands on and reverses the earlier symbolism associated with the shawl. The shawl that Magda previously “fed” on now saves Rosa’s life—a point Ozick stresses by describing her as “drinking” the shawl as though she’s taking nourishment from it. It’s only through Magda’s own death that the shawl is able to function in this way for Rosa. On the most literal level, it’s Magda’s loss of the shawl that leads to her death; more figuratively, Ozick describes Rosa as “tasting” Magda’s saliva in the shawl in a way that recalls earlier mentions of cannibalism. The passage therefore points to the ways in which life and death are intertwined in the concentration camp. In some symbolic way, Magda’s death seems to ensure her mother’s physical survival while also marking the end of Rosa’s life in an emotional sense.

"The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner. Every day without fail it blazed and blazed, so she stayed in her room and ate two bites of a hard-boiled egg in bed, with a writing board on her knees; she had lately taken to composing letters."

Where images of the cold dominate “The Shawl,” “Rosa” lingers repeatedly on the oppressive heat of Rosa’s new home in Miami. Rather than contrasting these extremes of temperature, Ozick suggests a parallel between them; here, for instance, she describes the heat in terms that recall the concentration camp’s crematorium (“furnace”) and operators (“executioner”). In this way, Ozick hints that Rosa’s life in Florida continues to be defined by her experiences in the camp (something Rosa herself will later confirm). Rosa’s writing is another point of difference that ultimately marks similarities; whereas Rosa often couldn’t speak in the camp (most notably after Magda’s murder, when she stayed quiet to avoid being shot), she can now speak as much as she likes, but she directs the bulk of her speech to someone who can never hear it—her dead daughter.

"She wrote sometimes in Polish and sometimes in English, but her niece had forgotten Polish; most of the time Rosa wrote to Stella in English. Her English was crude. To her daughter Magda she wrote in the most excellent literary Polish. […] The room was littered with these letters."

Rosa and Stella’s differing relationships to Polish are reflective of each woman’s relationship to the past: Stella has forgotten her native language in much the same way that she would like to “wipe out memory” of her past entirely, whereas Rosa fetishizes the past (and Magda especially) through elaborate rituals and “literary” language (58). Rosa sees little need to adapt to life in the present by improving her ability to communicate English, but the irony is that she’s no more successful at communicating in Polish; Rosa is trying to speak to someone who’s dead, so the letters simply pile up in her room.

"One of her teachers in the high school praised her for what he said was a ‘literary style’—oh, lost and kidnapped Polish!—and now she wrote and spoke English as helplessly as this old immigrant. From Warsaw! Born 1906! She imagined what bitter ancient alley, dense with stalls, cheap clothes strung on outdoor racks, signs in jargoned Yiddish. Anyhow they called her refugee. The Americans couldn’t tell her apart from this fellow with his false teeth and his dewlaps and his rakehell reddish toupee bought God knows when or where."

The above passage illustrates some of the complexities of Rosa as a character. Rosa is Jewish by birth but not by practice, and her family prided itself on its assimilation into Polish society. As a result, Rosa often responds to others in ways that are anti-Semitic, as when she complains about the “jargoned Yiddish” that Persky and others speak. The remark is also intertwined with Rosa’s elitism; coming from a well-to-do family herself, she resents being lumped together with working-class people purely on the basis of ethnicity or religion—all the more so, presumably, given that neither her class nor her Polishness saved her from the Holocaust. Finally, the passage also draws attention to the ongoing problem of voicelessness in The Shawl, with Rosa lamenting the loss of her native language and her difficulty communicating in English.

"KOLLINS KOSHER KAMEO:

EVERYTHING ON YOUR PLATE AS PRETTY AS A PICTURE:

REMEMBRANCES OF NEW YORK AND THE

PARADISE OF YOUR MATERNAL KITCHEN."

Persky takes Rosa to a cafeteria that embodies much of what she holds in contempt, serving traditionally Jewish dishes to lower middle-class immigrants. It’s therefore particularly noteworthy that the sign outside links its cooking to the “maternal kitchen,” tying together an identity Rosa cherishes (motherhood) with one she distances herself from (Jewishness). What makes this even more significant is the fact that Jewish identity traditionally passes through the maternal line—that is, anyone whose mother is Jewish is Jewish themselves. Perhaps for this reason, Rosa later stresses that her own mother, though Jewish by birth, was “attracted” to Catholicism: “She let the maid keep a statue of the Virgin and Child in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes she used to go in and look at it” (41). The fact that Persky brings Rosa to this cafeteria foreshadows the ways in which his entry into her life will challenge her sense of herself as both Jewish and a mother.

"Rosa looked in the window. Her bun was loose, strings dangling on either side of her neck. The reflection of a ragged old bird with worn feathers. Skinny, a stork."

Many of the animal motifs that appear in “The Shawl” reappear in “Rosa” in slightly altered forms. In this case, Ozick’s description of Rosa as a bird hearkens back to the flight-related imagery in the short story—in particular, the account of Rosa as “floating […] alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road” (3-4). In “The Shawl,” Rosa’s ability to transcend her circumstances is tied to her love for her daughter (who is herself also associated with birds and other winged creatures). With Magda gone, Rosa has lost this ability, so Ozick now describes her as a flightless bird with “worn feathers.”

"It was real and it was not real. Shadows on a wall; the shadows stirred, but you could not penetrate the wall. The guests were detached; they had detached themselves. […] More and more they were growing significant to themselves. Every wall of the lobby a mirror. Every mirror hanging thirty years. Every table surface a mirror. In these mirrors the guests appeared to themselves as they used to be."

Rosa’s observations of the other elderly residents of her hotel are deeply ironic. As Rosa describes them, the guests have basically ceased to exist in reality. As the prevalence of mirrors in the lobby suggests, the people living there are entirely caught up in their vision of themselves, and those visions have become “detached” from the world around them: the guests live entirely in their fantasies of the past. What Rosa doesn’t seem to realize is that what she says of the guests in this passage is equally true of herself. Rosa’s obsession with her dead daughter is the guiding force in her life, although in her case the refusal to engage with present reality stems from trauma rather than simple narcissism.

"Magda’s shawl! Magda’s swaddling cloth. Magda’s shroud. The memory of Magda’s smell, the holy fragrance of the lost babe. Murdered. Thrown against the fence, barbed, thorned, electrified; grid and griddle; a furnace, the child on fire! Rosa put the shawl to her nose, to her lips. Stella did not want her to have Magda’s shawl all the time; she had such funny names for having it—trauma, fetish, God knows what: Stella took psychology courses at the New School at night, looking for marriage among the flatulent bachelors in her classes."

Rosa’s description of the shawl as both a “swaddling cloth” and a “shroud” captures the ambiguity of the object’s significance in the short story: although tied to infancy and life, it’s also intertwined with Magda’s death. This complexity carries over into “Rosa,” where the shawl is both a way of figuratively resurrecting Magda and, as Stella calls it, a “fetish” that speaks to just how empty and deathlike Rosa’s current existence is. Despite being Jewish, Rosa here thinks of Magda in Christ-like terms (as a “holy babe”) with a death mirroring Jesus’s crucifixion (“thorned,” for instance, recalls the crown of thorns): Magda’s death can be read as a kind of symbolic self-sacrifice in which the shawl that earlier saved her life goes on to save her mother’s. The details of the analogy are ultimately less significant than the fact that it is an analogy; Rosa copes with Magda’s death by retreating further into imagination and symbolism, telling stories about her daughter’s survival, constructing ceremonies around objects like the shawl, and investing her daughter’s death with metaphorical significance.

"Disease, disease! Humanitarian Context, what did it mean? An excitement over other people’s suffering. They let their mouths water up. Stories about children running blood in America from sores, what muck. Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn’t have to say human being."

Even before she reads Dr. Tree’s request to interview her, Rosa responds with anger to his description of the research project he and others are engaged in. As the above passage reveals, she views his clinical and jargon-filled explanation as a form of revictimization—one that keeps the subjects of the study at arm’s length so that the researchers don’t have to consider the ethical implications of using the suffering of other “human beings” to further their own careers. The passage also picks up on the motif of cannibalism, portraying the researchers as feeding off of Rosa and other victims of the Holocaust.

"Big flakes of cinder lay in the sink: black foliage, Stella’s black will."

Rosa’s decision to burn Dr. Tree’s letter is symbolically significant; in effect, she consigns it and him to the same fate as the victims of the Holocaust, with the “black foliage” of the letter’s ashes recalling the “bad wind with pieces of black in it” from “The Shawl” (6). She also associates the action with Stella’s “black will,” presumably because it was Stella who brought about Magda’s death in the “furnace” of the electric fence (31). By destroying the letter in this symbolic way, Rosa is trying to reassert her agency over those who have victimized her—not just the Nazis, but also Stella, as well as those who (like Dr. Tree) treat Rosa as a curiosity rather than as a human.

"Even Stella, who can remember, refuses. She calls me a parable-maker. She was always jealous of you. She has a strain of dementia, and resists you and all other reality. Every vestige of former existence is an insult to her. Because she fears the past she distrusts the future—it, too, will turn into the past."

In one sense, Rosa here accuses Stella of doing precisely what Rosa herself is doing: refusing to acknowledge reality. The fact that she makes this accusation in a letter to her dead daughter, whom she is pretending has survived to become a professor, is particularly ironic. Ozick hints that there’s some truth to Rosa’s claim that Stella “refuses” to recognize the past in a way that is fearful and dysfunctional. Although Stella is better able to navigate her new life than Rosa is hers, she hasn’t been much more successful than her aunt at forging meaningful new relationships; despite her best efforts, Stella is still unmarried and childless. Furthermore, the heavily symbolic style Ozick uses in “The Shawl” makes Stella’s claim that Rosa is a “parable-maker” especially noteworthy; Rosa’s tendency to construct stories and meanings around objects like the shawl mirrors what Ozick herself does as a writer, and is therefore perhaps a worthwhile activity in some circumstances.

"Something like that. Better than that, more remarkable. [My mother’s] Polish was very dense. You had to open it out like a fan to get at all the meanings. She was exceptionally modest, but she was not afraid to call herself a symbolist."

In addition to showcasing the pride Rosa takes in her family’s culture and education, the above passage reveals a great deal about her relationship to language. In describing her mother’s poetry, Rosa seems most impressed by its “denseness” and “symbolism”—that is, by the fact that it has no immediate connection to the outside world, instead operating by its own set of internal, literary rules. This is telling, because it’s also true of the way in which Rosa herself uses language; rather than trying to communicate with those around her, she writes letters to her daughter that shore up her own fantasy world.

"What a curiosity it was to hold a pen […] a pen that speaks, miraculously, Polish. A lock removed from the tongue. Otherwise the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate. An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve! To lie."

Along with the shawl, language has the ability to figuratively summon Magda back from the dead; through the stories she imagines, Rosa “retrieves” and “reprieves” the daughter who died in reality. Significantly, it is only Polish that allows Rosa to do this: what Rosa calls a “living language” is actually another relic of her past that she refuses to let go of. Polish is also deeply intertwined with Rosa’s sense of her own and her family’s superiority; she prides herself, on the fact that they spoke Polish rather than Yiddish. This suggests another reason for the Polish language’s “miraculous” capacity to resurrect Magda—namely, that her family’s use of it was an indication of their assimilation into Polish society, and that it therefore ought to have “reprieved” them from persecution as Jews.

"Her pants were under the sand; or else packed hard with sand, like a piece of torso, a broken statue, the human groin detached, the whole soul gone, only the loins left for kicking by strangers."

As Rosa’s theories about what happened to her missing underwear become stranger, it also becomes clearer what her fixation on the missing clothing is truly about. In the above passage, she imagines that someone has buried her underwear on the beach, but that image quickly gives way to an image of disembodied “loins left for kicking by strangers.” Given that Rosa earlier says she was “forced by a German […] and more than once,” it seems clear that the passage refers to her feelings during and after being raped—in particular, her sense of being dehumanized and reduced to her sexual organs (43).

"Rosa hugged the box; she was feeling foolish, trivial. Everything was frivolous here, even the deepest property of being."

The above passage gets to the heart of one of the main reasons Rosa has so much difficulty adjusting to life in Miami: the sheer scale of what she experienced during the Holocaust makes ordinary life look “trivial” by comparison. She fears the ordinariness of her surroundings will somehow diminish what she went through and reveal it too as “frivolous.” This helps explain both why she makes a “relic” of Magda’s shawl, and why she insists more broadly on Magda’s saintliness and her own uniqueness; Rosa fears that acknowledging herself to be, as Persky says, a “regular person” would constitute a betrayal of her past suffering.

“‘It can’t be. […] Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie.’

‘But it’s over,’ Persky said. ‘You went through it, now you owe yourself something.’

‘This is how Stella talks. Stella—Rosa halted; then she came on the word. ‘Stella is self-indulgent. She wants to wipe out memory.’

‘Sometimes a little forgetting is necessary,’ Persky said, ‘if you want to get something out of life.’”

Rosa is aware that she’s living in the past, and that in doing so, she’s not really living at all. Nevertheless, she sees the alternative as unthinkable, and perhaps equivalent to denying that her daughter ever existed. Her claim that Stella wants to “wipe out memory” is especially significant, given that Stella brought about Magda’s death in the first place; in Rosa’s mind, Stella is now threatening to “kill” Magda a second time by erasing any memory of her. Persky—a better-natured character than Stella—also defends the value of forgetting. Ultimately, Ozick depicts Rosa’s obsession with her dead daughter as unhealthy, if understandable.

“The whole room was full of Magda: she was like a butterfly, in this corner and in that corner, all at once. Rosa waited to see what age Magda was going to be: how nice, a girl of sixteen; girls in their bloom move so swiftly that their blouses and skirts balloon; they are always butterflies at sixteen. There was Magda, all in flower. She was wearing one of Rosa’s dresses from high school. Rosa was glad: it was the sky-colored dress, a middling blue with black buttons seemingly made of round chips of coal, like the unlit shards of stars. Persky could never have been acquainted with buttons like that, they were so black and so sparkling; original, with irregular facets like bits of true coal from a vein in the earth or some other planet.”

Ozick’s description of Magda “coming to life” draws on and develops several of the work’s key images and themes. For instance, while the comparison of Magda to a butterfly may seem at first glance like nothing but a means of highlighting her beauty and grace, it becomes darker in light of this passage from “The Shawl” describing Magda’s death: “The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine” (9). The similar imagery in the two passages points to the way in which Rosa’s life continues to revolve around her experiences during the Holocaust. Rosa’s interest in the buttons, meanwhile, is a direct reference to Persky’s former button business, as well as Rosa’s disdain for it; partly because manufacturing is a blue-collar profession, and partly because buttons are common but only useful once attached to something, Rosa comes to associate Persky’s buttons with all of the “regular” and “useless” people in Miami she considers herself superior to. By contrast, the uniqueness of these buttons allows Rosa to believe that she and Magda don’t share the same fate as those around them, not just in the present but also in the past—that is, that Magda escaped death in the concentration camp.

“Rosa wanted to explain to Magda still more about the jugs and the drawings on the walls, and the old things in the store, things that nobody cared about, broken chairs with carved birds, long strings of glass beads, gloves and wormy muffs abandoned in drawers.”

In this passage, the full significance of Rosa’s antique shop becomes clear. Rosa has already told Persky that she smashed up her shop out of frustration with her customers, whom she described as “deaf.” Then, in the letter to Magda immediately preceding this, Rosa describes trying to tell her customers stories about her experiences of the Holocaust, reiterating that they didn’t seem to understand her. Her remark that she sold “old things […] that nobody cared about” is therefore telling; the antiques in Rosa’s store are symbols of her own past, which she herself takes pains to preserve, but which others seem uninterested in or (in Stella’s case) eager to set aside.