Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely amazing
Review: My English teacher read this to us my Senior year of high school and I went out and bought it right away. (And not just because I had to write a paper on it over spring break and needed a copy to do it. <g>) The author's writing is so captivatingly different that she draws you in and won't let go. Beautiful, haunting, and honest.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely amazing
Review: My English teacher read this to us my Senior year of high school and I went out and bought it right away. (And not just because I had to write a paper on it over spring break and needed a copy to do it. <g>) The author's writing is so captivatingly different that she draws you in and won't let go. Beautiful, haunting, and honest.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: My English Teacher Recommended this book to me. It was one of thirty books, all of which, she claimed, were essential reading. In the midst of finals, I picked up this book (mostly because it was short) and embarked on one of the best reading experiences of my life. This is an emotional, as well as an intellectual masterpeice. The short story in the beginning, is one of the most powerful I've read. It describes the death of Rosa's baby daughter in a nazi concentration camp. The following novella skips ahead 39 years, and we see rosa debilitated and emotionally broken. The sheer tradgedy of this brough me close to tears several times. On a more cerebral level, this book explored themes such as trauma and recovery, relationships to objects, dreams unexplored, and secret fantasies. On a final note, I was very pleased the Ms. Ozick used a secular Jew as her protaganist, because it created a more extreme conflice, and showed that the Nazi exterminations were NOT about belief.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing piece of fiction
Review: The Shawl is a hauntingly beautiful story and novella of a woman, Rosa, who watches her baby daughter, Magda, die at the hands of a concentration camp guard during the holocaust. Told in lyrical prose, Ms. Ozick captivates us with the symbol of the shawl representing everything that Rosa lost during the war. The shawl is what she hid her daughter Magda in at the concentration camp so that Magda wouldn't be thrown into the gas chambers. But, her evil niece Stella (who is with Rosa and Magda at the concentration camp) steals the shawl from the baby one night. The baby is then found and killed by a guard.The rest of the story tells of Rosa's life 39 years later as she has taken residence in a dumpy hotel room in Florida that evil Stella (who now resides in New York) pays for. Here, Rosa lives day to day in a sort of mental fit, deluding herself that Magda is still a live, a beautiful lioness, a doctor married to a doctor, living in a gorgeous house in New York. Amid open sardine cans and half eaten eggs, Rosa writes letters to this daughter. Toward the end of the novella, Rosa finally receives a box with the shawl in it which Stella has reluctantly sent to her. "Get on with your life; join a club; put on your bathing suit!" Stella tells her in a letter attached to the shawl. But, all that Rosa cares about is breathing in the shawl, Magda. Overall, this was certainly one of the greatest pieces of writing I've ever had the chance to read. Cynthia Ozick knows her subject, is deeply deeply in tune with her characters and touches us with all that they feel and do. I look forward to reading more of her work. She is a truly gifted writer who has much to offer the world.
Rating: 
Summary: brutal
Review: This slender volume consists of two award-winning short stories, both originally published in The New Yorker. In The Shawl (1980), Rosa Lublin is reduced to having her baby, Magda, suck on a shawl, in order to keep her quite enough to escape the notice of concentration camp guards. But when her niece, Stella, takes the shawl the baby is discovered and murdered in a particularly brutal fashion. Rosa (1983) takes place thirty years later in Miami. Rosa has recently destroyed her antique/junk shop in New York City. Now she barely scrapes by in a dingy hotel room, funded by Stella, the two joined to each other by secrets and guilt. She spends much of her time writing letters to Magda, on any pieces of paper she can scrounge. Though Stella says that life is divided into three parts for survivors : "The life before, the life during, the life after", Rosa finds herself eternally stuck in "during." The awful experiences of the past continue to dominate her life. For much of this story she is awaiting a package from Stella, a package that will contain the shawl : "Magda's shawl! Magda's swaddling cloth. Magda's shroud." Stella is a difficult woman, loathing everyone and everything around her. But then, who can blame her ? It is more a testament to the resilience of the human soul in general, than an indictment of this particular character, that more of the survivors of the Holocaust were not so embittered. GRADE : B
Rating:
Summary: brutal
Review: This slender volume consists of two award-winning short stories, both originally published in The New Yorker. In The Shawl (1980), Rosa Lublin is reduced to having her baby, Magda, suck on a shawl, in order to keep her quite enough to escape the notice of concentration camp guards. But when her niece, Stella, takes the shawl the baby is discovered and murdered in a particularly brutal fashion. Rosa (1983) takes place thirty years later in Miami. Rosa has recently destroyed her antique/junk shop in New York City. Now she barely scrapes by in a dingy hotel room, funded by Stella, the two joined to each other by secrets and guilt. She spends much of her time writing letters to Magda, on any pieces of paper she can scrounge. Though Stella says that life is divided into three parts for survivors : "The life before, the life during, the life after", Rosa finds herself eternally stuck in "during." The awful experiences of the past continue to dominate her life. For much of this story she is awaiting a package from Stella, a package that will contain the shawl : "Magda's shawl! Magda's swaddling cloth. Magda's shroud." Stella is a difficult woman, loathing everyone and everything around her. But then, who can blame her ? It is more a testament to the resilience of the human soul in general, than an indictment of this particular character, that more of the survivors of the Holocaust were not so embittered. GRADE : B
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