The Shawl

Stella is Rosa’s niece, although Ozick doesn’t specify this until the novella. At the time of the events of “The Shawl,” she is 14 years old and, unlike her aunt, doesn’t have a dependent to care for. Partly as a result of this, Stella is unable to face life in the concentration camp with the same composure as Rosa, and is instead constantly aware of her own suffering and fear; Ozick repeatedly describes her as “cold” and “ravenous” (3). She’s also bitterly jealous of Magda, whose age offers her some protection (at least for a time) from the horrors of the Holocaust; Stella wants to be babied and nurtured in the same way that Magda is, but the brutality of life in the camp has stripped most people, Rosa included, of their “pity” (5). As a result, Stella too comes to care only for herself; having envied the shawl Rosa used to swaddle Magda, Stella eventually steals it to use as protection from the cold and, perhaps, as a form of self-comfort.

As Rosa sees it, the act of stealing Magda’s shawl (and thus inadvertently killing Magda) permanently warps Stella’s character into something heartless and self-interested: in “Rosa,” she even refers to her niece as the “Angel of Death” (15). Ozick’s portrayal of Stella, however, isn’t unsympathetic. Although Stella didn’t have a Magda to balance out her own selfishness during her time in the concentration camp, she retains enough of a sense of compassion or responsibility to continue to support her aunt financially (though with exasperation) decades later. The greater realism that makes life in the camp so unbearable to Stella actually helps her in the outside world because she is unable to retreat into a fantasy world as Rosa does.

Magda is Rosa’s infant daughter, who is killed by a concentration camp guard at approximately 15 months old. Up until that point, she had been kept alive in large part by the shawl the story is named for: Rosa not only uses it to conceal her daughter, but gives it to her to use as a pacifier, keeping Magda quiet and perhaps even acting as sustenance in some mysterious sense: “It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights” (5). Eventually, however, Magda is spotted and killed by a camp guard, and Rosa—who had poured all her energy into Magda’s survival up until that point—is left broken and traumatized.

Magda continues to play a central role in “Rosa,” this time as a figment of her mother’s imagination. Unable to cope with her grief, Rosa writes to Magda frequently and uses her shawl to conjure up her daughter’s presence. In doing so, Rosa may inadvertently reveal more about Magda’s background and how it intersects with Rosa’s own trauma. As a baby, Magda had stereotypically “Aryan” (5) features—pale blonde hair and blue eyes—and Rosa continues to imagine her in this way after her death, even seeming to take pride in her daughter’s appearance; she addresses her, for instance, as her “yellow lioness” (39). At the same time, she denies one possible explanation for Magda’s looks—namely, that her father was an S.S. officer and that she was conceived via rape. Even after her own death, Magda acts as a focal point for Rosa’s anxieties about her past and the strategies she uses to deal with them—e.g., refusing to think about her sexual trauma and distancing herself from other Jewish victims of the Holocaust (“teeming Mockowiczes and Rabinowiczes and Perskys and Finkelsteins” (66)).

Persky is an elderly Jewish man who first appears in “Rosa.” He meets the title character at a laundromat and flirts with her, eventually walking her home and treating her to tea. Despite Rosa’s obvious disinterest and occasional rudeness, Persky remains good-tempered and talkative and continues to pay visits to her. Over time, it emerges that his wife is in a mental institution, which (as Rosa herself recognizes) is likely one reason why he is so cheerful in the face of Rosa’s moodiness and eccentricities. Persky attempts to impart some of his own cheerfulness to Rosa, urging her to get out into the world and stop constantly brooding over the past. As he sees it, contentment is largely a matter of choice, and therefore possible even in the midst of objectively bad circumstances: “For everything there’s a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better” (56).