The Shawl

Like Magda’s shawl, animal imagery is one way in which Ozick establishes a sense of continuity between the two halves of The Shawl. Broadly speaking, this imagery falls into a few distinct categories—animals that fly (e.g., birds, butterflies, moths), animals that are predators (e.g., tigers, lions, wolves), and animals that are parasites—and in many cases, Ozick uses the imagery in ways that subvert the reader’s expectations. For instance, the character Ozick most frequently associates with predators isn’t a camp guard or even the “young cannibal” Stella, but rather Magda—a helpless baby. Ozick describes Magda’s eyes, for instance, as “horribly alive, like blue tigers” (5), and Rosa frequently addresses her daughter as a “lioness” (6). In “The Shawl,” the tiger motif seems to hint at Magda’s unusual tenacity in clinging to life; perhaps because she is a baby, and therefore doesn’t understand the circumstances that surround her, Magda survives far longer than Rosa expects. Ultimately, even Magda’s will to survive is unable to save her, which gives Rosa’s later references to her as a lioness a darker tone. In much the same way that Rosa creates a fantasy in which Magda is still alive, she imagines her daughter as a creature all but incapable of being killed: “You are tawny and you stretch apart your furry toes in all their power. Whoever steals you steals her own death” (15).

Ozick’s use of bird and flight-related imagery is similarly complex and shifting. In “The Shawl,” Ozick initially uses the motif in a way that highlights people’s ability to imaginatively transcend even the most brutal physical circumstances; for example, Ozick describes Rosa “floating” (4) above the road as she fantasizes about giving Magda away. At the end of the story, Ozick undercuts this idea by tying the flight-related imagery to the horrible reality of Magda’s death: “All at once Magda was swimming through the air. […] She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine” (9). Then, by the time “Rosa” takes place, imagination is no longer a means of transcending reality at all, as Ozick compares Rosa to a tired and flightless bird: “[Rosa] kept the package tight against her bosom and picked through the crowd, a sluggish bird on ragged toes, dragging the cart” (30).

Buttons become an important symbol of everyday, mundane reality when Persky reveals that he manufactured buttons and other “knickknacks” (25). From that point on, buttons frequently appear in connection to Rosa’s rage over where her life has led her and, in particular, her resentment of the people she now finds herself living amongst. For Rosa, who prides herself on her educated and cosmopolitan upbringing, the other residents of Miami seem like buttons: trivial, common, and (once separated from a garment) useless. Rosa’s insistence that she herself is different is why she reacts with “gratitude” to Persky’s offer to take her to the library: “He almost understood what she was: no ordinary button” (57).

There’s an element of irony to this determination not to be an “ordinary button,” in that it ultimately exacerbates Rosa’s sense of alienation and dehumanization. In much the same way that Rosa—a victim of anti-Semitism herself—feels “a certain contempt” (52) for most Jews, she dismisses everyone around her as “shallow” and “light-minded” (53). It’s ultimately Rosa who suffers the most as a result of this; she rails against Dr. Tree for not seeing her as a “human being” (36), but, as Persky notes, she herself resists “being a regular person” (57) who shares a common humanity with those around her.

Rosa spends much of the novella obsessed with a pair of underwear that has gone missing during an outing to the laundromat. She initially assumes they must have fallen out of the pile of laundry, but later suspects that Persky found and pocketed them on purpose, and eventually goes looking for them on a nighttime walk through Miami, concluding that someone must have buried them in the sand on the beach. The missing underwear are therefore a means of exploring Rosa’s troubled mental state; she is suspicious of others to the point of paranoia and fixates on apparently trivial topics, perhaps as a way to avoid thinking about her past. Rosa obsesses over the loss of her underwear because it’s an easier form of loss to cope with than the loss of her daughter and the loss of her innocence.

Ozick uses Rosa’s reaction to the missing clothing as a way of hinting at the sexual trauma she has experienced. In a letter to Magda, Rosa mentions that she was raped during the Holocaust in a tone that borders on matter-of-fact: “I was forced by a German, it’s true, and more than once, but I was too sick to conceive” (43). Given how serious the subject is, Rosa’s very casualness is significant; it suggests a willful refusal to think too deeply about what’s happened to her, in part because (as she alludes to here) it’s possible that the child she was so devoted to was actually a product of rape. Ozick then links this possibility to the “theft” of Rosa’s underwear by having Rosa associate the “sex maniac” (34) who supposedly took them with “Stella’s pornography” (45)—that is, Stella’s supposedly lurid fantasies about Magda’s father being an S.S. officer. Rosa’s obsession with finding the missing underwear is therefore intertwined with the aftermath of her rape; her search for them is an attempt to recover her dignity and agency, but it’s fundamentally misguided because she can’t bear to consider what’s happened to her in a direct way.

Throughout “The Shawl,” Rosa worries that someone in the concentration camp will kill and eat Magda; at one point, for instance, Ozick writes that Rosa “was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs” (5). Although this particular fear never comes to pass, the motif of cannibalism serves as a way for Ozick to explore the desensitizing effects that cold, hunger, and the constant threat of death have on camp prisoners—most notably, on Stella. Although Stella’s actions in stealing the shawl lead directly to Magda’s death, Stella isn’t an inherently villainous character; rather, like Rosa herself, she has had her sympathy for others “annihilated” by the struggle to survive (5). As a result, she is willing to betray others in order to live a little longer, even though that also means betraying her own humanity. In that respect, it’s worth noting that in “Rosa,” Rosa herself has “cannibal dreams” about cooking and eating Stella; as much as Rosa condemns Stella for having gone “cold” (15) as a result of what she did to Magda, Ozick implies that Rosa has also lost some of her humanity through her experiences of the Holocaust.

In “The Shawl,” Ozick repeatedly draws attention to the coldness of the camp where Rosa, Magda, and Stella find themselves. It isn’t simply the physical conditions of the camp that “The Shawl” is concerned with, but rather the psychological effect that those conditions have on the prisoners. Stella, in particular, is cold not only in the literal sense of the word, but also in the sense that life in the camp causes her to become emotionally cold, stealing Magda’s shawl and then reacting callously to the baby’s murder.

By contrast, “Rosa” contains multiple references to the scorching heat of Miami, where the title character now lives. At first glance, this appears to indicate the contrast between Rosa’s experiences during the Holocaust and her life almost four decades later, but over the course of the novella, it becomes clear that the cold of the camp and the heat of Florida aren’t the opposites they might seem. Rosa, for instance, describes herself as being in “hell”—a word that hearkens back to the “coldness of hell” in the opening lines of “The Shawl” (3)—and Ozick’s likening of “the streets [to] a furnace, the sun [to] an executioner” (14) recalls the crematoriums of the concentration camp. The heat of Florida underscores the continuity of Rosa’s experiences—that is, the fact that she is still trapped in the trauma of Magda’s death.

The antique shop that Rosa owns and destroys is a symbol of her own past (and, more specifically, her experiences during the Holocaust). Over the course of “Rosa,” it becomes clear that Rosa felt an affinity with the old objects she dealt in, which isn’t surprising given how much importance Rosa attaches to the relics of her own past, or how obsessively she works to keep that past alive. It’s significant, then, that Rosa also describes the objects in her shop as “things that nobody cared about” (69) because it captures what she at least feels is the world’s broader indifference toward her experiences. In fact, Rosa ultimately tells Persky that she smashed up her shop not because of her frustration with it, but because of her frustration with her customers, who “didn’t understand” (27) both the importance of what they were buying and the stories about the Holocaust Rosa attempted to tell them.