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BOOKS I READ: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (1989). Rosa Lublin is a broken old woman, now living in Florida, succumbing to the weight of her memories of the Warsaw Ghetto. This book is in two parts, a short story, also titled, The Shawl, that takes place in the eye of the Nazi storm, and a novella that takes place thirty years later. Rosa is an odd loner, haunted by the brutal murder of her infant daughter, Magda, who found comfort, shelter, and nourishment in Rosa’s shawl. Her niece, Stella, survived the horrors alongside Rosa. She now supports Rosa from New York where she has been able to make a new life for herself, something Rosa envies and despises.
In the much-acclaimed short story, The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick renders a grisly image of the inhumanity against the Polish Jews. In the novella, Ozick’s conclusion about Florida is biting, “It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty rib cages.” I picked up Ozick’s book after a reference to it in an article on the recently released documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” that examines the nation’s reaction to the Holocaust as it was happening. It was an excellent pairing.
For more, see my reading log page; or the previous entry in my reading log:
