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Title details for The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick - Available

The Shawl

by Cynthia Ozick
Yelena Shmulenson
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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Two award-winning works of fiction by one of America's finest writers, together in one collection. In "The Shawl," a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In "Rosa," that same woman appears thirty years later, "a mad woman and a scavenger" in a Miami hotel. She has no life in the present because her past will never end. In both stories, there is a shawl-a shawl that can sustain a starving child, inadvertently destroy her, or magically conjure her back to life. Both stories were originally published in the New Yorker in the 1980s; each was included in the annual Best American Short Stories and awarded First Prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Each succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness of its aftermath. Fiercely immediate, complex, and unforgettable, each is a masterwork by a writer the New York Times hailed as "the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time."

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 12, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781598877120
      • File size: 59102 KB
      • Duration: 02:03:07

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      When we first meet Rosa, The Shawl is wrapped around her toddler, Magda, as she and her niece, Stella, are being marched somewhere. Yelena Shmulenson gives just the subtlest tinge of accent to this section so that before the text clarifies what is happening, you are guessing--Eastern Europe? The Nazi years? In the main body of the story, Rosa is an old woman retired to Miami Beach. Here, Shmulenson uses no accent, a choice that heightens Rosa's reality: On the surface, she's assimilated, American. Inside, she is utterly shattered, a permanent refugee from the time before what happened, happened. This is a memorable, harrowing work, and Shmulenson gives us Rosa's deranged inner world with perfectly modulated sensitivity and power. It will haunt you. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 1, 1989
      ``The Shawl'' is a brief story first published in the New Yorker in 1981; ``Rosa,'' its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. Each story won First Prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories in the year of its publication; each was included in a ``Best American Short Stories'' collection. Together, they form a book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind. ``Lublin, Rosa'' (as the main character refers to herself) has lived through the Holocaust; she resents being called a ``survivor'' because she is a ``human being.'' Resettled in Miami in 1977 after years in New York, she does not have a life in the present because her existence was stolen away from her in a past that does not end. Like Bellow's Herzog, Rosa writes letters in her head; but Rosa's are to her dead daughter Magda, whose shawl she has preserved as both talisman and security blanket. Rosa periodically conjures Magda's life at different stages (as a teenager, as a doctor living in Mamaroneck); yet she is haunted by the reality of her baby's murder. Ozick carefully steers the reader through the mazes of Rosa's mind, rendering her life with unsparing emotional intensity.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 29, 1990
      ``The Shawl'' is a brief story first published in the New Yorker in 1981; ``Rosa,'' its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. They tell a story of a woman who survived the Holocaust but who has no life in the present because her existence was stolen away from her in a past that does not end. ``A book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind,'' concluded PW .

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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