The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick [best english novels for beginners .txt] 📗

Critical praise for Cynthia Ozick

“Read this great little book of Cynthia Ozick’s: It contains dazzling staggering pages filled with sadness and truth.”

—Elie Wiesel, Chicago Tribune

“Beautiful and harrowing, these stories are a masterly achievement.” —Bruce Bawer, Wall Street Journal

“Cynthia Ozick continues to amaze…. In her two stories in The Shawl we are provided with another thrilling demonstration of her remarkable creative talent and of the powers of her exceptional fiction to inform and affect us profoundly.”

—Joseph Heller

“Cynthia Ozick really is one of the grand masters of the American short story; no one living does them better.”

—Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

“The combined effect of the story and the novella is immensely poignant and beautifully wrought.”

—Harold Bloom

“The publication of this book is a major landmark both in Cynthia Ozick’s distinguished career and in the lifetime of the Holocaust. Ozick has earned a place in modern literature beside her own heroes: Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Bernard Malamud.”

—Howard Schwartz, St. Louis Dispatch

“As vivid as figures backlit by a bolt of lightning.”

—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

ALSO BY CYNTHIA OZICK

Trust

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories

Bloodshed and Three Novellas

Levitation: Five Fictions

Art & Ardor: Essays

The Cannibal Galaxy

The Messiah of Stockholm

Metaphor & Memory: Essays

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1990

Copyright © 1980, 1983 by Cynthia Ozick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1989.

The two stories comprising this work, “The Shawl” and “Rosa,” were originally published in The New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Persea Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Todesfuge” from The Poems of Paul Celan, a bilingual edition, translated by Michael Hamburger.

Copyright © 1988 by Michael Hamburger.

Reprinted by permission of Persea Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ozick, Cynthia

The shawl / Cynthia Ozick.

p. cm.

“Originally published in the New Yorker”—T. p. verso.

Contents: Thw shawl — Rosa.

ISBN 0-679-72926-7

I. Title.

[PS3565.Z5S5 1990]

813’.54—dc20 89-40638

         CIP

Ebook ISBN 9780593313206

a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

PAUL CELAN, “Todesfuge”

Contents

THE SHAWL

ROSA

The Shawl

Stella, Cold, Cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes stella carried Magda. But she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breasts of her own, stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms. Magda took Rosa’s nipple, and rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk; sometimes magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.

Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. She looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa’s bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat. You could think she was one of their babies.

Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda away in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of line they might shoot. And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised, or afraid; she might drop the shawl, and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die. The little round head. Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself. The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen.

It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights. Magda did not die, she stayed alive, although very quiet. A peculiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth. She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap, and Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness. On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda’s face. “Aryan,” Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said “Aryan,” it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said “Let us devour her.”

But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, but she did not walk very well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost