Abstract :
In The Shawl (1990) Cynthia Ozick constructs a narrative of the Nazi genocide around women’s experience, especially what it is like to be a mother in the time of the Holocaust. She creates a story about a Jewish woman, Rosa, whose daughter Magda, is slaughtered and Rosa has never recovered from this perennial shattering experience. After her identity as a mother has been disrupted and ultimately destroyed, she becomes obsessively preoccupied with the memories of her dead daughter and fantasizes a relationship with her. By forming the structural and symbolic center of the novella around the loss of Magda, Ozick manages to claim that the Holocaust survivors continue to suffer not only because they repeat their past experiences, but mostly because they start to define themselves by the absence of loved ones. By emphasizing the absence of her daughter through her obsession and fixation with the shawl that she used to wrap her in the concentration camp, Rosa creates a melancholic space that she can continue to live as a mother to Magda. Living in the darkness of that space, Ozick poses questions regarding the survival problems, such as feeling of guilt after surviving, lack of belief for the present or hope for the future. In addition to analyzing the novella with the perspective that it fictionalizes a person’s compulsion to repeat the traumatic event and thus creates an endless mourning as a reaction to the Holocaust, this article will further the general criticism by focusing on being a mother during the Holocaust and how the survivors cope with not being a mother anymore once the genocide is over.
NaturalLanguageKeyword :
Holocaust , Motherhood , Remembering , Mourning.
