The Shawl

In “Rosa,” Ozick adopts a narrative style that differs widely from the one she used in “The Shawl.” Where the latter contains very few details concerning setting or character—in fact, “The Shawl” never even clarifies what Stella’s relationship is to Rosa—“Rosa” is much more specific and concrete in its approach, describing Miami extensively and filling in the details of Rosa’s life before the war. On the face of it, this might seem to contradict one of the central ideas in the novella, which is that Rosa’s life in Miami isn’t really a life at all, and that the only time that truly exists for her is the time she spent in the concentration camp. As she says to Persky: “Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays” (58). However, the greater realism of “Rosa” aligns with something Persky says just prior to this: that Rosa isn’t used to “being a regular person” (57). The shift in tone between the two stories illustrates the difficulty of trying to reacclimate to mundane and ordinary existence after experiencing tragedy and trauma on a larger-than-life scale.

Rosa clearly struggles with this acclimatization, most obviously in the sense that her entire existence revolves around Magda, whom she imagines to be (and at times perhaps believes to be) alive. Rosa’s unwillingness to engage with reality also extends to the question of Magda’s parentage; Rosa is emphatic that Magda was not in fact fathered by an S.S. officer as Stella suspects, but her very vehemence suggests that she’s trying to avoid acknowledging that her beloved daughter was conceived through rape.

As Persky notes, it isn’t simply the traumatic aspects of reality that give Rosa difficulties, but rather the “frivolous” (53) ones. Throughout the novella, Rosa clings to the idea that she is special and unlike the “useless buttons” that largely populate Miami. She often reflects fondly, for instance, on her family’s wealth and refinement while lamenting the fact that they were ultimately lumped together with Poland’s working-class Jewish population: “[W]e were furious in every direction, but most immediately we were furious because we had to be billeted with such a class […] We were not of a background to show our fury, of course, but my father told my brothers and me that my mother would not be able to live through it, and he was right” (67).

As this passage suggests, part of Rosa’s reluctance to be seen as simply another “button” is a reaction to the fact that her family’s privilege did not mark them as special to the Nazis. Arguably, it also stems from the fact that what Rosa experienced during the Holocaust was itself so out of the ordinary that a return to being a “regular person” seems impossible, or at least irresponsible: Rosa is deeply offended by Stella’s attempts to be “an ordinary American, indistinguishable” because it seems to her like a denial of the past (33). The fact that Stella is better adjusted to her new life than Rosa may suggest that, as Persky puts it, “a little forgetting is necessary” (58). It also speaks to the ongoing influence the Holocaust has had on Stella; the “coldness” that Stella developed in response to life in the concentration camp continues to be a major motif in “Rosa,” where she reacts impatiently and at times cruelly to her aunt’s grief.

The question of how to remember or cope with the past intersects with another major concern in The Shawl: language and voicelessness. The latter plays a particular role in the short story, “The Shawl,” where silence is both a survival strategy and a figurative form of death: Magda initially survives in the concentration camp because she makes no noise, but her cries for her stolen shawl are proof that she actually cares about living fully. And Rosa, to survive, is forced to stop her own screams as she watches her child’s murder, though she never fully lives again after that moment. In “Rosa,” by contrast, voicelessness takes on a slightly different meaning. Though now free to speak as much as she wants, Rosa struggles to find listeners. When Persky asks her about her store, for instance, Rosa complains, “Whoever came, they were like deaf people. Whatever you explained to them, they didn’t understand” (27).

Significantly, Rosa’s store sold antiques—that is, objects from the past. Her difficulty communicating with her customers is therefore symbolic of the broader problem of trying to explain a historical event like the Holocaust to those who haven’t experienced it. Likewise, Rosa writes letter after letter to Magda, who of course can never read what her mother has written. In this case, Rosa’s use of language seems ultimately less an attempt to communicate and more a retreat into her own imagination; like the shawl itself, the letter writing is part of a ritual that Rosa uses to keep her memories of Magda alive, with the “excellent literary Polish” (14) she uses, recalling the way she “perfect[s]” herself before “mount[ing] the bed on her knees and [falling] into folds” to brood over the past (44).