Review by Booklist Review
Two stories--artfully and powerfully related--tell the horror of an infant's murder in a Nazi concentration camp and its haunting effects years later in Miami Beach.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
``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. (Sept . ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is actually a five-page prologue and an extended short story. Aside from that, Ozick gives us exactly what we expect: a meditation, in figurative language at times dense and shimmering, at times richly colloquial, of the consequences of the Holocaust. Accompanied by her niece and hiding her tiny daughter, Magda, Rosa stumbles toward a concentration camp, where Magda is to die, flung against an electrified fence. Years later, in America, we meet ``Rosa Lublin, a madwoman and a scavenger, who gave up her store--smashed it up herself--and moved to Miami.'' She still writes to her dead daughter, whose shawl she covets. When Rosa meets brash, voluble Simon Persky at the laundromat, she resists his arguments that ``you can't live in the past'' with some persuasive arguments of her own. Indeed, the reader is uncertain to the end whether Rosa will bend--and whether she ought to. A subtle yet morally uncompromising tale that many will regard as a small gem.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two well-known--and particularly fine--stories by Ozick, now brought together in a single volume: ""The Shawl"" (a ""stark, chillingly deliberate story of mother-child annihilation in a Nazi death camp"": Kirkus) and ""Rosa"" (""a breathtaking story of a Holocaust survivor's justifiably mad life in vulgar yet touching Miami Beach"": Kirkus). Both were first-prize winners in O. Henry Prize Stories collections (1981 and 1984), and both also appeared in Best American Short Stories. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
