"The Shawl"

"The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick, is the kind of story that haunts you for the rest of the day. It takes about an hour to read, but several hours to get out of your thoughts. "The Shawl" relates the story of a Polish Jew named Rosa who survives the Nazi Holocaust. Her baby daughter Magda is murdered by a Nazi, who throws the child into an electric fence. The Shawl is the swaddling cloth of this child, and provided something for the child to suckle after her mother dries up from starvation.

Once again I felt that the plot itself was not the important thing. The focus of this story was on perspective. In particular, how a perspective shaped by the horrors of the Holocaust can color all things a darker and more dismal tone. Ozick approaches seemingly ordinary things through the eyes of her character, rather than providing the reader with stark, uninterpreted reality. Ozick does not allow things to be as they are, she only presents them as Rosa sees them.

For example; Rosa casts her niece, Stella, as an Angel of Death. Her niece had lived through the Holocaust as well, and has dealt with it in a different way. We do not see Stella as she is, we see her only as Rosa sees her, evil and twisted and plotting against her. Rosa describes Miami in terms that are especially jarring to anyone who has been there. The beautiful hotels along the beach are described as dark and ugly teeth devouring the city, a description that only fits the sadly distorted worldview that Rosa now has. Everything Rosa does or sees is tainted by her experiences of the Holocaust.

This sort of descriptive narrative is a valuable thing to make use of in writing. We should strive to make our descriptions not only tell what is there but to reflect the perspective of those we are speaking of. We are given few details about Rosa's life in "The Shawl," but you come to know her not because of facts about her experience, but because you see things through her eyes. I am reminded of the moment in the Pixar film, Ratatouille, when the arch food critic Anton Ego orders up a dish of perspective. When the protagonist serves him a peasant dish (Ratatouille), it sheds a tremendous amount of light on the character of Anton Ego, as we see through his eyes his reasons for becoming a food critic.It is not the details and the facts which make a story great, it is the opportunity to see through the eyes of another, to understand them from the inside, at a level that cannot be achieved with "just the facts ma'am".