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    The Shawl
    The Shawl
    The Shawl
    Audiobook2 hours

    The Shawl

    Written by Cynthia Ozick

    Narrated by Yelena Shmulenson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Two award-winning works of fiction by one of America's finest writers, together in one collection.

    In "The Shawl," a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In "Rosa," that same woman appears thirty years later, "a mad woman and a scavenger" in a Miami hotel. She has no life in the present because her past will never end. In both stories, there is a shawl-a shawl that can sustain a starving child, inadvertently destroy her, or magically conjure her back to life.

    Both stories were originally published in the New Yorker in the 1980s; each was included in the annual Best American Short Stories and awarded First Prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Each succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness of its aftermath. Fiercely immediate, complex, and unforgettable, each is a masterwork by a writer the New York Times hailed as "the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateNov 12, 2008
    ISBN9781598877120
    The Shawl
    Author

    Cynthia Ozick

    Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Harper's, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.

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    Reviews for The Shawl

    4/5

    166 ratings18 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I found this to be kind of on the boring side. Don’t remember when I actually started to read this, just remember the joy of finally being done with the book. Maybe reading a sad book during the pandemic wasn’t the greatest thing to do.
    • 5/5
      Like stabbing a spade into the soil and striking bone.
    • 2/5
      The Shawl is really two short stories, the one of Magda, a toddler who is killed by Nazi guards in a concentration camp, and one of Rosa, who lives in and out of sanity in Florida some years later. It seems to me as if these stories are written in stream of consciousness mode (yawn) and and something is "missing." I have read some beautiful soul-touching pieces of literature about the Holocaust, but this is not one of them. Good thing it was only 70 pages.
    • 2/5
      The Shawl is really two short stories, the one of Magda, a toddler who is killed by Nazi guards in a concentration camp, and one of Rosa, who lives in and out of sanity in Florida some years later. It seems to me as if these stories are written in stream of consciousness mode (yawn) and and something is "missing." I have read some beautiful soul-touching pieces of literature about the Holocaust, but this is not one of them. Good thing it was only 70 pages.
    • 4/5
      In Auschwitz, mother wraps her baby in her Shawl and hides it but eventually the Nazi's find the baby.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant and brutal.
    • 4/5
      Terse and harrowing, The Shawl is a dry-mouthed nightmare, interrupted only to discover the droning window unit has went demonic.
    • 4/5
      In addition to the title short story, the audio recording I listened to includes the novella Rosa. The Shawl is set in a concentration camp, and Rosa is set in Miami several decades later. The events of The Shawl are difficult to hear, but it's mercifully short. Rosa is a character study of a Holocaust survivor. The narrator's voice had me picturing Rosa as Sophia on The Golden Girls. That's not as odd as it seemed to me at first since the actress who played Sophia, Estelle Getty, was Jewish, not Sicilian like her character!
    • 3/5
      The Shawl actually comprises two stories, "The Shawl" and its sequel, "Rosa". "The Shawl" is very short and is just not the type of writing that appeals to me. "Rosa" was much better (partly because it was much longer and thus more fleshed out all around). Both, though, were filled with metaphor and simile, almost to the point of supersaturation.
    • 4/5
      Giving this one 4 stars, but I can't really explain why. Not really a book I can put into words, and at times I wasn't too sure about it. I won't say I enjoyed it. It's not a book that can bring joy, but will bring understanding. It's short, it's worth the read, and I think many readers will appreciate the writing like I did, overall.
    • 4/5
      The Shawl is the first book I've read concerning the Holocaust but it's everything one would expect it to be. A horrific, poignant, lyrical, and heartbreaking narrative of one woman's life before, during and after the traumatizing events for the Jewish during WWII. Listening to Yelena Shmulenson's skillful narration brought Rosa's suffering to life and doesn't fail to evoke heartache for her plight.

      The Shawl is a poignant short story, a very short story but is also very unusual for it's ability to pack an emotional punch with so few words. It tells of Rosa's incarcaration inside a Jewish concentration camp in WWII with her 15-month-old baby Magda and her 14-year-old niece Stella. Rosa's approximately 24 years old at this time.

      Starved and freezing, Rosa has run out of milk to feed her baby and instead Madga sucks on her protective shawl that Rosa has used to hide her baby's existence from the guards. Stella steals the shawl claiming she was cold and Magda is found and horrifically killed by a German soldier by throwing her into an electric fence in front of her stunned mother, who stuffs the newly found shawl into her mouth to silence her screams.

      Rosa is a novella showing a snapshot of Rosa Lublin's life at 59 years old. It's a portrait of a woman with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. She lives in the past, is haunted by it, is so obsessed with it that she writes letters to a not-dead made up version of Magda with a full back-story. Rosa is adamant that Stella is a liar, that Magda isn't dead, that Magda wasn't the product of rape by a German soldier.

      Rosa, just a few months before, had had a mental breakdown smashing up her antiques store and is now living in Miami in a cheap hotel for the retired, financially supported by Stella. Her room is bare of decoration and her life is just as bare of friends and social activity.

      On a rare visit to the laundrette she meets 71-year-old almost widower Simon Persky, another fellow Polish expat. She doesn't take kindly to his interference in her life, his chatty demeanor or the fact that he isn't easily intimidated as he's used to the not quite sane as his wife is in an asylum. His uncanny perceptiveness and tenacity in pursuing Rosa as a friend softens her up a little though she's adamant that, "My Warsaw is not your Warsaw." He had left Poland before the Nazi occupation. When he tells her to live her life a little, she responds "Thieves took it." She's not wrong. Thieves took her daughter's life and with it Rosa's life as a mother - the only thing she was desperately clinging to in the concentration camp - had died with her. It didn't matter that Magda was mere days away from death by starvation.

      Letters from Dr. Tree deeply upset and infuriate Rosa. Despite his polite tone his letters are disrespectful in his request to include her in his psychological study of Holocaust survivors. His language is scientifically dense and inaccessible to anyone but him. She had been a refugee, a survivor and now she was a specimen - she constantly asks why she isn't simply referred to as a human being rather than a thing to be studied and used.

      Over and over again Rosa is shocked and dismayed at people's ignorance of the Holocaust and of the concentration camps. At first she believed they had forgotten but she comes to realise that they've never been told of the horrors in the first place. For her, it's as if those events happened just yesterday instead of 30 years ago. She's stuck in that time period and can't move on. She has no friends, only her niece whom she had rescued from the orphanages once the residents of the concentration camps had been liberated.

      It's obvious that Stella has also struggled to embrace life as she hasn't managed to fulfil her desires for marriage and a family. Instead, Stella and Rosa appear to be co-dependent. Stella deprives Rosa of the all-important shawl to force Rosa out of the past but Rosa begs and Stella sends it to Miami. Rosa's reaction to it as the most precious thing in the world is deeply sad. It doesn't live up to her expectations at first, in its colour, its smells, that is until it does the one thing she wants the most: catapault her back into the past to be with her beloved baby.
    • 3/5
      I am not one much for dealing with crazy main characters and I would've enjoyed this novelette more had it bee written with less symbolism and more straight forward. However, that being said, The Shawl is made up of one short story, The Shawl, and one longer tale, Rosa. The Shawl tells the tale of Rosa, Magda, and Stella, taken by the SS and incarcerated in the Warsaw concentration camp and how Rosa believed the shawl protected Magda from detection until one day Stella takes it and Magda is discovered and tossed against the electric fence. The second tale, Rosa, goes 39 years into the future to Rosa being half crazed down in Miami and shows how the shawl still affects her life.
    • 4/5
      The short story included here, "The Shawl," is a brief but powerful holocaust story, showcasing a mother's love in the worst of times. The novella, Rosa, though, is a POV I don't see much: what every-day life is like for survivors 30 years later, when they have so little to hold on to and every encounter is tainted with the memories of what they've been thorough. Quick to read, but not quick to forget.
    • 5/5
      Death and what comes after. This is what fiction is about. Amazing.
    • 4/5
      Author Ozick tells a haunting story of a person whose Holocaust experience affected her everyday existence. A short story but very poignant in its content.
    • 5/5
      This is the kind of writing readers hope to find and savor. Each word is evocative and perfect, and in 70 pages Ozick gives us what other authors struggle to do in hundreds: a story and character we'll never forget and always treasure. Thank you, thank you, labfs39 for recommending this!!!The book opens with a short story limning the experience of Rosa, who, with her 14-year old niece (Stella) and infant daughter (Magda), is force-marched from Warsaw to a death camp. In a thoughtless act of self-preservation, Stella brings about events which ruin Rose's and Magda's lives. The second story, a novella, picks up Rosa's life as a crazy older woman living in Miami years later. She is supported from New York by Stella, who alternately berates her and encourages her to get on with her life. But as crazy as she is, Rosa often seems to be the one who truly sees reality. For anyone thinking this will be a depressing read, I can only say, "give it a try". By the end of the short story you won't be able to forego reading about Rosa's future. Simply gorgeous storytelling.
    • 4/5
      My copy of this title is the Vintage International edition, which contains both the short story, The Shawl, and the related novella, Rosa. In The Shawl we meet Rosa and Stella, two women walking under guard to a Nazi concentration camp. Wrapped in a shawl and hidden within its folds is Rosa's infant daughter, Magda. Once in the camp, Rosa works to keep Magda hidden from the guards and protect her from Stella's jealousy. The shawl, symbolizing hope, is the magic that allows Magda to live. When the shawl is taken, tragedy inevitably follows.The novella, Rosa, takes place thirty years later. We learn that Rosa has wrecked her successful shop in New York, and Stella has exiled her to a hotel in Miami to live. Rosa lives as a recluse, despite the overtures of an elderly Jewish man named Persky. "My niece Stella," Rosa slowly gave out, "says that in America cats have nine lives, but we-we're less than cats, so we got three. The life before, the life during, the life after." She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, "The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we were born.""And during?""This was Hitler.""Poor Lublin," Persky said."You wasn't there. From the movies you know it." She recognized that she had shamed him; she had long ago discovered this power to shame. "After, after, that's all Stella cares. For me there's one time only; there's no after."Persky speculated. "You want everything the way it was before.""No, no, no," Rosa said. "It can't be. I don't believe in Stella's cats. Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie."Rosa is unable to move forward, unable to forget, and dependent on the shawl as a device for bringing her beloved Magda to life. This is a sad story on many levels: Rosa's psychological damage incurred during the Holocaust, her continued tortured relationship with Stella, the meager life she leads, and her prejudices as a formerly wealthy, assimilated Polish Jew against the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe. This story reminds us that although the concentration camps of the Holocaust were liberated, not everyone was able to leave them.
    • 4/5
      There are two short stories in this edition, The Shawl and Rosa. Both are stunning and heartbreaking stories of the holocaust. In the first a woman watches, helpless, as a concentration camp guard murders her infant daughter. In the second that same woman is in America living with her memories. I have read many stories of the victims of the holocaust about the terror and bravery, but I don't think I've ever come across one addressing how some dealt with the horror through insanity. Here, Rosa fixates on a shawl that becomes almost magical in its abilities. In a unique way the shawl allows Rosa to keep living even in the face of the unimaginable.I listened to this book on audio and was immediately immersed, transported into the bleak, empty, fierce world of a holocaust survivor. These are short stories at their best, thick and concentrated, demanding your full attention, and leaving you breathless and gasping at the end.