Summary
Rosa and her niece Stella are walking the roads together, both freezing cold. Rosa’s daughter Magda is hidden and wound up in the shawl Rosa carries. Stella is fourteen and sometimes jealous of Magda, wanting to be held and rocked. There is never enough milk for Magda and Rosa never stops walking. Magda sucks air and screams.
Rosa does not feel hunger anymore; rather, she feels like she is faint, in a trance. She looks down at Magda, safe in the shawl’s windings. Her face is round, with blue eyes and smooth yellow hair; Rosa’s complexion is dark. One would think Magda is one of “their” babies (“their” being the Nazi guards).
Rosa wishes she could leave Magda in one of the villages they pass, but she cannot move beyond the line or she will be shot, and she does not know if a woman would actually take Magda. It is not worth the risk. Magda is a good baby and never complains even though she tries both breasts and gets nothing. She sucks the shawl instead and floods it with wetness, giving it the good flavor of “milk of linen.”
Rosa believes this is a magic shawl, and it keeps Magda alive. Magda is very grave and very quiet; she is mute now that the milk has dried up. Stella says Magda looks Aryan, and Stella’s tone makes Rosa shudder and think of a cannibal.
Magda lives to walk but does not walk well because her belly full of air makes her wobbly. Stella also grows but not much; she does not menstruate, and neither does Rosa. Rosa thinks Stella wants Magda to die so she can sink her teeth into her.
Rosa does believe Magda will die soon, but she is kept safe in the magic shawl. No one takes Magda away, but it is only a matter of time. Now that Magda is walking someone will find her, and Rosa is very afraid.
Magda’s eyes are horribly alive like “blue tigers.” She watches and laughs even though she’s never seen anyone laugh before. She laughs when the wind with the pieces of black ash in it makes her shawl flutter. She guards her shawl and no one can touch it. Stella wants to but she is not allowed.
One day, though, Stella takes the shawl away; the narrator tells us that this causes Magda's death. Stella says she was cold which is why she took the shawl and put it over her, and made Magda flail about looking for it. Every morning Rosa and Stella have to go out for roll-call and Rosa brings Magda concealed in the shawl, but today Magda runs outside before Rosa, looking for the shawl. She sways on her “pencil-legs” and is “howling.” This is strange, because normally Magda is “defective, without a voice.” Now, though, her mouth is “spilling a long viscous rope of clamor.”
Magda is wobbling about in the sunny arena, grieving for her shawl. Rosa’s nipples hammer commands, but she does not know if she should get the shawl first or Magda. If she gets Magda first the howling will not stop, but if she gets the shawl first then Magda would be back but she would be mute and dumb.
Rosa returns to the dark to find the shawl and sees Stella curled up under it. She grabs it and rushes outside. The light is warm and there are hints of butterflies and meadows, things that do not exist anymore here in the barracks. There is an electric fence and Rosa has always thought there were “real sounds in the wires: grainy sad voices.” These were “lamenting” voices, and they tell her to open the shawl. She does, and it unfurls in the wind.
Magda is riding on someone’s shoulders and reaches out. The shoulders do not come toward Rosa, though, and move further into the distance toward the electrified fence. The electric voices chatter “Maamaa, maaamaaa” together. Then Magda is swimming through the air like a butterfly, and she “splashes” against the fence. The “steel” voices grow mad and urge Rosa to run forward to Magda. But she cannot obey them, and stands there because she will be shot; she can also say nothing or she will be shot. She takes the shawl and stuffs it in her mouth and lets it swallow up her screech and “[drinks] Magda’s shawl until it dries.”
Analysis
“The Shawl” is guileless and sparse but delivers an enormous emotional wallop not just with its shocking climax but also with every grim, elementally disturbing sentence. Ozick was not in a concentration camp herself, but as a Jewish woman who lived during the period of the Holocaust and who immersed herself in the stories of her people, she felt compelled—almost as if by an unseen force—to pen this story. She, and critics, have wrestled with whether or not it is appropriate for the Holocaust, or Shoah as the Jews often refer to it, to be written about by someone who did not experience it, but there is no easy consensus on the matter.
Ozick’s stylistic choices are deliberate and impactful. She includes no dialogue. She does not mention the words “Nazi,” “Jew,” “concentration camp,” “Hitler,” or anything similar. She writes in the third person, knowing she could never seek to assume the first-person voice of authority. Her language is highly metaphorical and allusive, as when she intimates that there is a crematoria where the characters are at with the phrases “ash-stippled wind” and “the bad wind with pieces of black in it.” Critic Amy Gottfried notes its “unclassifiable structure,” calling it a “literary anomaly” full of “paradox, contradiction, and inversion.” Miriam Sivan says that “the clipped language reflects the confinement, the fixed boundaries of a concentration camp’s electrified fences and the press of rifle butts.” What Ozick is doing with her writing even though she did not directly experience the camps, Sivan suggests, is emphasizing the reality that Jews know themselves through language, through their “narrative of existence,” through recording. Primo Levi says that he read numerous works of history and biography but they are essentially inadequate and “never have the power to give us the depths of a human being: for this purpose the dramatist or poet are more appropriate than the historian or psychologist.” Ozick can use her fiction to get at the horror in a way that facts and figures and causes and effects cannot. Sivan quotes scholar Norma Rosen on how fiction like this allows readers to “enter . . . into a state of being that for whatever reasons makes porous those membranes through which empathy passes, or deep memory with its peculiar ‘thereness,’ so that we can move, as far as it is given to us to do so, into the pain . . . of the Holocaust.”
While millions suffered and died in the Holocaust, Ozick writes the story of three fictional individuals—one who dies, and two who live (the novella Rosa carries on with Rosa and Stella’s stories after the camp). From its first lines she creates a bleak landscape of cold, starvation, pitilessness, fear, trauma, and resignation. Rosa and Stella’s bodies lose their fertility, and Rosa does not even feel like a person anymore: “she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, a trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel.” Relationships between people break down, which Rosa notes when she thinks “Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs” and “she knew that one day someone would inform; or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her.”
Magda is the product of a rape, something alluded to here but not confirmed until the novella. She bears the features of her Aryan father but Rosa loves her anyway, giving her all her own food and keeping her safe inside the shawl for as long as she can. Rosa isn’t naïve, however; she knows that “Magda [is] going to die very soon.” Gottfried provides a chilling overview of what could happen to pregnant women in the camps: “If discovered by Nazi guards, pregnant women were forced to undergo induced labor, after which their babies were killed. Pregnancy could also result in additional tortures, beatings, or even live cremation in the ovens. Giving birth in the camps was punishable by death, but a mother might survive by secretly killing or having someone else kill her baby. One survivor, Ola Lengyel, noted that although ‘the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us,’ still ‘we saved the mothers’.” Rosa manages, then, to carry Magda, bear Magda, and keep her alive for fifteen months, which is a profoundly impactful act of resistance.
Magda lives because she is “wound up in the shawl.” This shawl is one of the most contradictory and powerful symbols of the text. First, she is described inside her shawl in both positive and negative ways. She is a “squirrel in a nest, safe” but she is also “wound up,” “buried away,” in “windings.” Gottfried notes the contradictions in the shawl, saying “what sustains Magda is her own burial.” Billie Jones also sees the shawl as “safety and a shroud.” It connects Rosa and Magda as a “richly evocative symbol for the feminine, the maternal,” provides emotional comfort for Magda, and then allows Rosa to “stuff the consuming ache of a lost child” at the end, yet it keeps Magda in silence and its absence is the reason for her death.
Magda’s death scene is almost too much to comprehend. Simply, Magda is thrown against the electrified fence and falls down to the ground, which Rosa witnesses but can do nothing about for fear she will be killed herself. Ozick uses metaphorical, surreal language, saying Magda is “swimming through the air,” “travelled through loftiness,” looking like “a butterfly touching a silver vine.” There is an argument to be made that Ozick is turning the horror of this moment into aesthetics, but there is more to it. First, the soldier is not the focus, he is not even mentioned as a “he,” and Magda is contrasted as a living butterfly with his mechanical nature. Gottfried believes Ozick is not denying the brutality of the Holocaust but instead giving a “graceful death” and “an instant of transcendence.” Magda is light, beautiful, and released.
