First, she is described inside her shawl in both positive and negative ways.

This paper shall examine the above-mentioned aspects of Ozick’s imaginative experience of the Holocaust, concluding how she could reconcile between two contradictory impulses: the impulse to keep the sacred intact and the counter impulse to unload the burden of expressing the self. This shawl is one of the most contradictory and powerful symbols of the text. Torn between the desires to retain silence and to let the world know, and between the nightmarish experience of the Holocaust and the surrealistic encounter with its memory, the stories use, evocative symbols that give the fictional world created by Ozick, its own fictive authenticity, making it as paradoxically close to and distant from the historical event. Depicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, The Shawl recalls the psychological and emotional scars. The Shawl By Cynthia Ozick Published: 1980 Overview Considered one of the greatest fiction writers and critics alive today ( The New York Times ), award-winning author Cynthia Ozick received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 1968 at the age of 40, two years after she published her first novel. But, unlike most of the Holocaust fiction, the two stories of The Shawl and Rosa do not so much integrate historical records of what actually happened, as much as they dramatically reenact the whole agony within a symbolic framework. Against her profound belief in the inadequacy of any fictional work to perfectly represent the Holocaust, Cynthia Ozick wrote her novella The Shawl under the inexorable pressure imposed by her sense of belonging to the collective memory of Jewish suffering.

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick