Sunday book pick: Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust novella, ‘The Shawl’, predicts the Palestine horror

“The life before, the life during, the life after. … The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.”

“And during?”

“This was Hitler.”

Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” and “Rosa” were respectively published in The New Yorker in 1980 and 1983 as long stories. British publisher W&N edition published both stories as a single novella, The Shawl, in 1989. No longer than 70 pages, the novella is a triumphant vignette of Nazi oppression during the Holocaust and its undiminished legacy in the afteryears of the war.

A tragic silence

The first section comprises “The Shawl”, 97-year-old Ozick’s best-known work. Set in a concentration camp during the Nazi occupation, we are introduced to Rosa and her baby, Magda, and Rosa’s niece Stella. It can be assumed that Stella’s parents are missing and Rosa is in charge of the two children. The Nazis know only about Stella and Rosa; Magda is hidden in a white shawl and held closely to Rosa’s breasts. Starving and weightless, the baby “sucks air” from her mother’s breasts. Stella too craves similar protection and has a cannibalistic hunger for Magda. As for Rosa, she does not feel hunger; she’s perpetually “arrested in a fit”. The shawl, white and light, becomes a magical object...

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