The Shawl

When we first meet Rosa, The Shawl is wrapped around her toddler, Magda, as she and her niece, Stella, are being marched somewhere. Yelena Shmulenson gives just the subtlest tinge of accent to this section so that before the text clarifies what is happening, you are guessing--Eastern Europe? The Nazi years? In the main body of the story, Rosa is an old woman retired to Miami Beach. Here, Shmulenson uses no accent, a choice that heightens Rosa's reality: On the surface, she's assimilated, American. Inside, she is utterly shattered, a permanent refugee from the time before what happened, happened. This is a memorable, harrowing work, and Shmulenson gives us Rosa's deranged inner world with perfectly modulated sensitivity and power. It will haunt you. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

September 1, 1989
``The Shawl'' is a brief story first published in the New Yorker in 1981; ``Rosa,'' its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. Each story won First Prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories in the year of its publication; each was included in a ``Best American Short Stories'' collection. Together, they form a book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind. ``Lublin, Rosa'' (as the main character refers to herself) has lived through the Holocaust; she resents being called a ``survivor'' because she is a ``human being.'' Resettled in Miami in 1977 after years in New York, she does not have a life in the present because her existence was stolen away from her in a past that does not end. Like Bellow's Herzog, Rosa writes letters in her head; but Rosa's are to her dead daughter Magda, whose shawl she has preserved as both talisman and security blanket. Rosa periodically conjures Magda's life at different stages (as a teenager, as a doctor living in Mamaroneck); yet she is haunted by the reality of her baby's murder. Ozick carefully steers the reader through the mazes of Rosa's mind, rendering her life with unsparing emotional intensity.