Im excited to begin reading these short stories and essays that describe and take place in the traumatic experiences, specifically those dealing with the holocaust.   Both Ozick and Delbo do amazing jobs at describing and translating to the reader the physical, mental and emotional traumas those captives of Auschwitz and other concentration camps had to endure.

            Personally, I found Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” much more compelling of the two readings.  Writing this narrative as the main character allowed Ozick to place the reader in the footsteps of a Jewish woman who has been captured during the Holocaust.  By making this story so personal and grim, the sad realities are made clearer and the writer was able to create a mood that might of resembled the depression and hopelessness that was felt in these concentration camps.  Secondly, her style of writing all together helps to translate the emotion and mental stabilities of someone suffering these traumas.  Ozick uses lots of repetition in her descriptions of the physical sensations that Rosa was feeling and seeing.  After going through so much torture, suffering, and objectiveness, one can only imagine that these captive’s mental stability would shrivel to near nothing.  In the opening sentence, “Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell”(2299), the word “cold” is repeated, and showed up many times in describing the environment and emotions felt throughout the story.  She also described Stella and Rosa as “ravenous” repeatedly in the first page (2299).  I felt that the dreariest description given to these characters were when compared to air.  Very few times in my life have I been so tired and exhausted that a sense of numbness came over my body that I would relate to feeling like air, which I imagine would be ten-fold for the characters of “The Shawl.”