Taylor Loftin

In the short biography written by Tresa Grauer, it is mentioned that for Cynthia Ozick, the written word is a tool for “arousal” and “enchantment.” This is certainly true in the way she uses metaphor and analogy to create a beautifully tragic depiction of a holocaust experience. In “The Shawl,” the characters are starving, freezing, under constant observation, and their lives are threatened physically at all times. All this, while concealing a small child. However, despite how traumatizing these experiences must have been, Ozick reflects upon them in a way that is childlike, imaginative, and pure, as if the narrator is a young girl observing the situation. Even as the child dies, the perspective is innocently poetic. It is best exemplified in the final line: “So she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried” (2301, Ozick). Ozick leaves it up to the reader to interpret what is metaphor and what is reality.