The Shawl

by Cynthia Ozick

Overview

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award comes a story about the Holocaust that "burns itself into the reader's imagination with almost surreal powers" (The New York Times).

"Read this great little book of Cynthia Ozick's: It contains dazzling staggering pages filled with sadness and truth." —Elie Wiesel, Chicago Tribune

A devastating vision of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness it left in the lives of those who passed through it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593313206
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,045,235
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Cynthia Ozick, a recipient of a Lannan Award for fiction and a National Book Critics Circle winner for essays, is the author of Trust, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Shawl, and The Puttermesser Papers. She lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

``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 .

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

Library Journal

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

From the Publisher

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

BookPage

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

The New York Times

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

Philadelphia Inquirer

When we first meet Rosa, the shawl is wrapped around her toddler, Magda, as she and her niece, Stella, are being marched somewhere. Yelena Shmulenson gives just the subtlest tinge of accent to this section so that before the text clarifies what is happening, you are guessing—Eastern Europe? The Nazi years? In the main body of the story, Rosa is an old woman retired to Miami Beach. Here, Shmulenson uses no accent, a choice that heightens Rosa's reality: On the surface, she's assimilated, American. Inside, she is utterly shattered, a permanent refugee from the time before what happened, happened. This is a memorable, harrowing work, and Shmulenson gives us Rosa's deranged inner world with perfectly modulated sensitivity and power. It will haunt you. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, SYNC 2014 © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2008 - AudioFile