The Shawl
Halperin, Irving
ROSA'S STORY THE SHAWL Cynthia Ozick Alfred A. Knopf, $12.95, 70 pp. Irving Halperin Cynthia Ozick's two master-pieces, "The Shawl," a story, and "Rosa,"a novel-la, are the two parts of...
...The "thieves" changed her from a genteel, cultivated person to a madwoman and scavenger...
...And yet, even such splendid literary art is not truly redemptive, for stories of the Holocaust cannot resurrect the dead, and many of those who survived are marked for life...
...Having come to Florida from Brooklyn, where she destroyed with a hammer her antique-furniture store, she is being begrudgingly subsidized by her forty-nine-year-old niece, Stella, who appeared in "The Shawl...
...Each piece is organically linked to the other...
...The story builds in tension and emotional power to an unbearable pitch, as Rosa looks on helplessly while her baby burns...
...She believes hat Magda was not murdered but rather survived, is married, and teaches in a university...
...Rosa is driven by etishes and bizarre delusions...
...the Holocaust echoes through the volume...
...First appearing separately in the New Yorker, both works were included in the annual Best American Short Stories-"The Shawl" in 1981 and "Rosa" in 1984-and awarded first prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection...
...Rosa is the main character in both...
...Even more disturbing for the reader, Rosa adheres to a kind of idolatry in making a relic of the shawl which once hid Magda...
...The foolish Florida rains spray down so light, so brief and fickle, no one pays attention...
...Ozick's extraordinary volume is a particularly welcome achievement of the moral imagination...
...subsequently, in the search for it, Magda is killed by a camp guard, who flings the baby against an electrified fence...
...It is a testimony to Ms...
...Rosa walked...
...The question that this story raises is whether sanity is possible for Rosa after the unspeakable abuse (for one, she was raped more than once by Germans) that she suffered during the Holocaust...
...The Shawl" focuses on a horrifying incident in a Nazi concentration camp where Rosa Lubin, Polish Jew, has hidden her fifteen-month-old baby, Magda, in a shawl...
...Ozick's large talent for the unsettling image is in evidence when Rosa alludes to these retirees as "scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty rib cages...
...The mother writes unmailed letters to her dead daughter in an excellent literary Polish...
...In a time when the memory of the Holocaust is being trivialized by slick fiction, talk shows, and TV "documentaries," and when some social "scientists" (necrophiliacs, Rosa would call them) are doing "research projects," written in atrocious psychobabble, on the "survivor," Ms...
...idolatry because, in the narrator's view, Rosa is worshiping dead matter...
...Ozick's artistry and depth of understanding that Rosa, though given to rage and moments of dementia, is sympathetically drawn...
...Irving Halperin Cynthia Ozick's two master-pieces, "The Shawl," a story, and "Rosa,"a novel-la, are the two parts of this volume...
...Persky, who would like to draw her away from obsessively living in the past...
...Nothing can alter those tragic facts...
...Rosa" opens three decades later in Miami, where Rosa, now a fifty-eight-year-old, resides in the "dark hole" of a single room at a hotel for elderly retirees...
...everyone in search, bedouins with no fixed path...
...A quick lick of lighting above one of the balconied hotels...
...What the Nazis "stole" was not only her parents and not only her language and culture but also her very desire for living in the present...
...The baby continually suckles the linen shawl, uselessly seeking nourishment after the drying up of her mother's breasts...
...Thieves took it," Rosa says to a kind, concerned seventy-one-year-old gentleman, Mr...
...Published together, they now take on added power and resonance...
...The sand never at rest, always churning, always inhabited...
...In a stunning tour de force passage brilliantly combining precise, lapidary prose, immigrant English, and Henry Jamesean allusiveness, Rosa's search for a pair of missing underpants is rendered against a backdrop of a surrealist nighttime Miami: The streets are clogged with wanderers and watchers...
...The portrait of this tormented woman s, by extension, a study of how the Nazis leformed their victims...
...Neon alphabets, designs, pictures, flashing undi-minished light through the sudden small rain...
...Much Yiddish...
...In mythicizing her Warsaw past (what she calls the real life, when she was the daughter of "important" parents), she dismisses the elderly people in the streets of Miami as "old ghosts" without a "real life...
...Rosa's fourteen-year-old niece, Stella, steals the shawl...
...copulation under blankets at night, beneath neon-radiant low horizons...
...here she is referring to her pre-Holocaust life in Warsaw...
...Caravans of slow old couples, linked at the elbows, winding down to the cool of the beaches...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 22
