Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” is a haunting short story published in the New Yorker in 1980. Ozick later included it with a novella about the main character, Rosa, in a single volume also entitled The Shawl.
Ozick is Jewish but did not experience the Holocaust firsthand because she was living in America; however, she felt compelled to write “The Shawl” after reading a sentence in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published by William Shirer in 1960. The sentence was about a baby being thrown into an electric fence, a moment so viscerally and unbelievably horrifying that Ozick said she wrote the first five pages “as if I heard a voice.” She was very clear that she “[had] no entitlement to this part because it’s an experience in a death camp. I was not there. I did not experience it.” Nonetheless, she believed her story would be an important window into the trauma of the Holocaust.
In later years, however, Ozick evinced more concern over her writing of “The Shawl,” explaining in 1993, “I did [the story] because I couldn’t help it. It wanted to be done. I didn’t want to do it, and afterward in a way I’ve punished myself, I’ve accused myself for having done it. I wasn’t there, and I pretended through imagination that I was. I’ve also on occasion been punished in angry letters from people who really were there. But I wasn’t there, and the story is not a document, it’s an imagining.”
“The Shawl” is frequently anthologized and studied by literary critics and students.
