The Shawl

by Cynthia Ozick

Overview

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, ¿The Shawl¿ and ¿Rosa¿ succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both ¿The Shawl¿ and ¿Rosa¿ won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

In ¿The Shawl,¿ a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In ¿Rosa,¿ that same woman appears thirty years later, ¿a madwoman and a scavenger¿ in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawl¿a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``The Shawl'' is a brief story first published in The New Yorker in 1981; ``Rosa,'' its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. They tell a story of a woman who survived the Holocaust but who has no life in the present because her existence was stolen away from her in a past that does not end. ``A book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind,'' concluded PW .

Library Journal

This is actually a five-page prologue and an extended short story. Aside from that, Ozick gives us exactly what we expect: a meditation, in figurative language at times dense and shimmering, at times richly colloquial, of the consequences of the Holocaust. Accompanied by her niece and hiding her tiny daughter, Magda, Rosa stumbles toward a concentration camp, where Magda is to die, flung against an electrified fence. Years later, in America, we meet ``Rosa Lublin, a madwoman and a scavenger, who gave up her store--smashed it up herself--and moved to Miami.'' She still writes to her dead daughter, whose shawl she covets. When Rosa meets brash, voluble Simon Persky at the laundromat, she resists his arguments that ``you can't live in the past'' with some persuasive arguments of her own. Indeed, the reader is uncertain to the end whether Rosa will bend--and whether she ought to. A subtle yet morally uncompromising tale that many will regard as a small gem.-- Barbara Hoffert

From the Publisher

Performed by Yelena Schmulenson, whose emotional accuracy eats into your heart.”
—BookPage

BookPage

Cynthia Ozick is the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time.
—The New York Times

The New York Times

Brilliant miniatures, rich with passion and compassion.
—Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia Inquirer

Brilliant miniatures, rich with passion and compassion.
—Philadelphia Inquirer

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169982114
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	11/12/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

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