Read Recently: “The Shawl: A story and Novella” by Cynthia Ozick
Title: The Shawl: A Story and Novella
Author: Cynthia Ozick
Origins: I’ve enjoyed Ms. Ozick’s essay collections for some time. An interview on "Forum" here in San Francisco informed me of her fiction.
A short book, I used is as a breather between longer reads.
Synopsis: A short story then a novella, set several decades in the future, about the same character, a Jewish immigrant named Rosa Lublin. In "The Shawl" (first published in 1981 in The New Yorker and anthologized dozens of times since), Nazi death camp guards pry Rosa’s infant daughter from her arms and murder the baby by throwing her against an electrified fence. In the novella, Rosa is an old woman living in South Florida, suspicious, angry, sniffing around the edges of a world she feels ingored her suffering so many years ago.
Verdict: "The Shawl" is devastating, the horrible, flat unfurl of a nightmare, like a pirate flag inching up a mast. Small wonder it gets reprinted and taught. Structurally, its as tight as a gun barrel and about that dangerous.
"Rosa", the novella published three years later, also in The New Yorker, does not sustain as well. Ozick’s insistant jabbing prose which works so beautifully in her essays (each feels as thick and necessary as a long-hanging tree branch) feels shrill in a story as much about defeat as about fear. Too often, Ozick gets in her characters way by telling of her in barks rather than narrative. The setting and mood are sublimely textured, deep enough to sink into and drift about. But Ozick is too pushy with the plot, using an essay voice when a storytelling one is a better fit, yelling to make an argument when there isn’t one to be made. This makes her, enduringly a pleasure to read, but not so much to listen to.