“Prisoners Gradually Came to Buddhist Positions”: The Presence of PTSD Symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

In a well-known 1993 interview in Contemporary Literature, Elaine M. Kauvar asked Cynthia Ozick if the Holocaust should remain history. The answer could not be more straightforward:

It should. I believe with all my soul that it ought to remain exclusively attached to document and history. [. . .] If the Holocaust becomes commensurate with the literary imagination, then what of those recrudescent Nazis, the so-called revisionists, who claim the events themselves are nothing but imaginings?”

(Kauvar 390)

It is quite clear that Ozick was expressing her concern for the danger of revisionism and denial of the Holocaust as a consequence of its fictionalization. After hearing the above answer, Kauvar’s question about Ozick’s own fictionalization of the Holocaust was inevitable. The novelist replied:

I did it in five pages in “The Shawl”, and I don’t admire that I did it. I did it because I couldn’t help it. It wanted to be done. I didn’t want to do it, and afterward I’ve in a way 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.”

(Kauvar 391)

Ozick’s feelings of discomfort for having written a story like “The Shawl” (1980) stemmed from her belief that the issue of the Holocaust should be addressed from a nonfictional point of view like in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) rather than from a purely artistic perspective, unless a novel about the Holocaust is written by a true witness like Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel. Although Ozick has repeatedly acknowledged that she is not a true witness of the Auschwitz horror, she felt the need to fictionalize it.

The Shawl (1989) is a novella composed of two stories, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” (1983), which were originally published in The New Yorker.¹ “The Shawl” focuses on the protagonist Rosa’s titanic efforts to save her fifteen-month-old daughter Magda from starvation. The tale acutely depicts Rosa’s suffering as the epitome of the victim’s pain during the Holocaust. “That [Ozick] never uses the word ‘Jew’, ‘Nazi’, or ‘concentration’ paradoxically increases the story’s impact” (Schwarz 305). “Rosa” is the story of a Holocaust survivor whose past is a burden that does not allow her to live in the present, just in the past. “The Shawl” might then be regarded as a symbol of the memory of Rosa’s daughter, who has been haunting Rosa in the same way as images of the torture and murder of people in concentration camps haunt the survivors of the Holocaust.

The Shawl has been analyzed from several points of view. For example, Burstein (1987) and Lyons (1987) stress the importance of the role of art in Ozick. Specifically, Burstein addresses the theme of the potential versus the actual and Ozick’s concept of “(anti-)idolatry” of the finished work. Schwarz (1999) and Jones (2002) explain the use of symbols in the novella and how these help the reader understand the dichotomy that has plagued Rosa’s life since Magda’s death. Malcolm (2002), who deals with the issue of identity, focuses on the interrelation between Rosa’s clinging to her Polish past and her sense of loss. Friedrich (2004) centers her interest on midrashic that is, ancient oral tradition intertextuality in The Shawl. Friedrich’s main point is that Ozick addresses an avant-garde trend in fiction that emphasizes the novelist’s “secondary orality.” Kolár’s (2004) article explores the significance of symbolism in The Shawl and its implication for the two main manifestations of remembering the Holocaust among survivors: denial and obsession. Finally, Sivan (2005) and Wirth-Nesher (2006) approach the issue of the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath by focusing on the role played by different languages in...