Abstract: Silence is a crucial topic in Holocaust studies, and the response of American Jews to the Holocaust immediately after the Second World War remains a polemical issue. The Jewish American female writer Cynthia Ozick and her representative The Shawl perform a positive act of breaking the postwar silence. Due to religious, historical, and socio-political reasons, American Jews have been accused of collective Holocaust amnesia in the postwar era. Ozick has also undergone the transition from shunning the Holocaust to confronting the event steadfastly. As Ozick’s “literary manifesto” of breaking the silence, The Shawl offers the panorama of the imagined Holocaust survivor—Rosa Lublin’s traumatic life before, during, and after the Holocaust based on the thematic topic of silence.Lawrence Langer’s concept of “preempting” the Holocaust is transplanted to offer the conceptual basis for reconsidering the historical context of postwar America and reevaluating the ethics of Holocaust representation. “Preempting” the Holocaust refers to gestures that take advantage of the Holocaust as a humanistic lesson to achieve moral redemption and to promote higher values. Ozick, inheriting the Jewish doctrine of Zakhor, the midrashic style of narrative, and the Hasidic legend of “pure intention,” manages to contrive her own writing strategies for Holocaust representation without falling into the wrong path of “preempting” this unprecedented calamity in human history.
Keywords: silence; postwar American Jewry; Cynthia Ozick; The Shawl;Lawrence Langer; preemptThe 1990 Vintage International edition of Cynthia Ozick’sThe Shawlis no more than seventy pages long. Compact as it is, its impact on Holocaust literature, especially American Holocaust literature, has been far-reaching. Several critical appraisals of this book are listed as part of the front matter. For instance, Howard Schwartz (b. 1945) praisesThe Shawlas “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”; Peter S. Prescott (1935–2004) compliments Ozick as “one of the grand masters of the American short story”; Bruce Bawer (b. 1956) commendsThe Shawlas “a masterly achievement”;Elie Wiesel (1928–2016)—the Holocaust survivor, renowned writer and 1986 Nobel Peace laureate—acknowledges the tremendous impact of Ozick’s “dazzling staggering pages filled with sadness and truth.”The fact that Ozick is not a Holocaust survivor adds critical interest to the success ofThe Shawlas a work of Holocaust fiction. Born in New York City, her family, like the majority of Russian Jews, immigrated to America to escape the vigorous growth of anti-Semitism and pogroms. Despite her American girlhood, the world of Hebrew and Yiddish was a more natural environment for her, and her passion for literature began to ferment at a young age. In an interview with the Paris Review, Ozick expresses her credo for novel writing: “Write about what you don’t know . . . When you write about what you don’t know, this means you begin to think about the world at large. You begin to think beyond the home-thoughts. You enter dream and imagination.” The Shawlilluminates exactly how Ozick, as an American Jew, separated from the atrocity that happened in central Europe, imagines the unimaginable.
I. The Myth of Silence: Postwar American Jewry and Cynthia Ozick
Certain critics, such as Peter Novick (1934–2012), have expressed the idea that immediately after the war and the genocide, silence prevailed among the Jewish American community, and the Holocaust was largely neglected if not totally forgotten by them. One of the reasons behind this socalled silence is related to the improvement of the economic situation of American Jews in the 1950s when they determined to embrace Americanism and cast off the label and identity as immigrants. As a consequence, they had to create a shared memory with the wider American population rather than become obsessed with their own culture and history, especially the Holocaust. As claimed by Alan Mintz (1947–2017), “[the 1950s] was a celebration [of economic success] at which the Holocaust and everything we now associate with it were not welcome guests.”In the political arena, the Cold War followed immediately after the Second World War, and the tension between America and the Soviet Union was perceived by American Jews, who“hesitated to name Germany as the culprit”in public, for the reason that Germany had become“a supposedly rehabilitated partner in the United States’ crusade against the Soviet Union.”Intensified political pressure to a large extent suppressed the overt discussions of the Holocaust among Jewish American communities. However, this does not necessarily imply that all of them ignored the occurrence of the atrocity, but even when they organized commemorations, those activities were restricted to Jewish communities and thus did not impinge on larger American society. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1945–2018) suggests that before 1967 the Holocaust couldn’t be mentioned in public discourse; instead, this unprecedented cataclysm turned into a “family secret” that was “hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code and casual reference.”
In the religious domain, the Holocaust was somewhat overlooked by American Jews during the 1950s when, according to Edward Shapiro (b. 1938), “Jewish communities did not sponsor Holocaust commemorations.”After the 1970s, this situation changed dramatically, and the Holocaust commemorations reached its apogee in the early twenty-first century when American Jews celebrated the 350th anniversary of their settlement in North America. During the anniversary, various liturgical forms of commemoration of the Holocaust were held. The 1950s religious commemorations of the Holocaust pale in comparison to those of the twenty-first century.
Apart from the abovementioned aspects, certain Jewish American intellectuals—such as Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Arthur Miller (1915–2005), Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), Jerzy Kosinski(1933–1991), and Philip Roth (1933–2018)—are criticized for their “ indifference” to this catastrophe, as they seldom wrote in Yiddish, for the obvious reason that this language would render their works less accessible to an English-speaking audience. Norma Rosen (b. 1925)criticizes the absence of the Holocaust from Jewish American literature during the postwar era:“ American Jewish writers have omitted it from their work. Not only have they not treated it directly but also they have not in most cases allowed it to color their response to Jews.”Roth acknowledges later that Jewish American writers in the 1950s were reluctant to “take the Holocaust up so nakedly as a subject,”but its existence wasn’t ignored by “most reflective Jews”whose consciousness of the Holocaust was “there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing,unforgotten.”
Historians and critics believe that the transition of American Jewry’s attitude toward the Holocaust commenced with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) in Israel. The broadcast of this trial on both radio and television provoked an international sensation, and the awareness and visibility of this atrocity increased dramatically worldwide. The world reacted as if it were the first time that they had heard about the Holocaust. The trial was a moment of awakening, under which circumstance American Jews began to reexamine the magnitude and impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
While the abovementioned viewpoints sustain the myth of the silence of postwar American Jews, Hasia Diner (b. 1946), along with other critics, undertakes detailed investigations to combat the stereotypical accusations of postwar American Jewry’s “Holocaust forgetfulness,” “Holocaust amnesia,” “Holocaust indifference,” and “Holocaust invisibility.” She examines a large number of documents, sermons, and archival materials to excavate evidence to prove that American Jews in the postwar era did “in fact think, speak, and write about the horrific events.”In the first place,Diner discovers that immediately after the Second World War, Jewish American communities,instead of neglecting the Holocaust, remembered it and talked about it among themselves in the forms of sermons, prayers, poetry, prose, radio broadcasts, journals, and lectures. However, these modes of representation were conducted in Hebrew or Yiddish, which explains the low visibility of their efforts of remembrance.Diner demonstrates three pieces of evidence she uncovered to defend her proposition. The first one is a book calledBlessed Is the Match, with the subtitleThe Story of Jewish Resistance(1947),written in English by Marie Syrkin (1899–1989), narrating the story of Hannah Senesh(1921–1944), a female parachutist from Palestine who was captured, tortured, and executed by the Nazis during a mission to rescue Hungarian Jews before they were further deported to the death camps in Poland.The second is a radio program,Faith In Our Time, that aired on July 20 and 24,1955, and told the story of a Jewish family’s “miraculous” escape from wartime Vienna as well as their resettlement in America. After the war, they participated in efforts to help Holocaust survivors immigrate to the United States.The last example cited by Diner is the public burial of destroyed Torah scrolls at the cemetery of the Hebrew Institute of University Heights on December 28,1958.The 1958 burial was sponsored by the Synagogue Council of America, which was engaged in several projects of “receiving, refurbishing, and distributing Jewish ritual objects—Torah scrolls as well as silver pointers, breastplates, crowns, sacramental wine goblets,”which were looted by the Nazis during the war and recovered by the US Army after liberation. Diner considers this public burial as a powerful proof to support her argument that the Holocaust was not forgotten or overlooked by Jewish American community in the postwar period.So far, two different standpoints on American Jewry’s responses to the Holocaust, either silence or speech, in the postwar period have been elaborated. This essay maintains that the debate will be endless if the criterion of judgement is based on quantity rather than quality or intention of representation and commemoration. Works that are unqualified or that lack “pure intention” have the risk of “preempting” the Holocaust, as Lawrence Langer argues. The concept of “preempting”the Holocaust refers to the actions of those intellectuals, artists, and religious leaders who were dedicated to “using—and perhaps abusing—its [the Holocaust’s] grim details to fortify a prior commitment to an ideal of moral reality, community responsibility, or religious belief that leaves us with space to retain faith in their pristine value in a post-Holocaust world.”
Langer offers three examples of unqualified Holocaust representations, namely, Tzvetan Todorov’s (1939–2017) universalization of the Holocaust as well as his suggestion that moral life is still possible for both victims and perpetrators in the concentration camps, Judy Chicago’ s(b. 1939) search for meaning from the Holocaust, and eventually Frans Jozef van Beeck’ s(1930–2011) sermons advocating that lessons learnt from the Holocaust can benefit the later generation in terms of hope, fellowship and humanity. Langer labels them as “exemplarists,” and associates himself with “literalists,” namely, Primo Levi (1919–1987), Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985), Ozick, and others. Literalists dare to confront the evilness and brutality of the Holocaust with the “pure intention” to present it, without “a cause to plead or a campaign to launch.”Langer’s conception of “preempting” the Holocaust redefines the connotation of “silence” that does not necessarily refer to absolute nothingness or muteness. The efforts of American Jewry’s commemorations and representations are not fully observed, heard, and felt by the general public,partly because they are conducted through either Hebrew or Yiddish within a restricted space, but the fundamental reason behind the phenomenon of “invisibility” is caused by the lack of “pure intention” in these representations. The breaking of silence in the late 1960s is the result of several factors, one of which should be credited to the emergence of more mature and qualified Holocaust literature.Ozick’sThe Shawlepitomizes postwar American Jewry’s sincere and qualified recapitulation of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Ozick also underwent a shift from “preempting” the Holocaust to presenting the event for its own sake. Ozick would have been almost the same age as Anne Frank(1929–1945), had she not perished in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Ozick stated in several interviews that she could not help but compare their disparate fates unconsciously. While the Holocaust was claiming the lives of millions of Jews and Frank was hiding in an attic in Amsterdam, Ozick was in high school, enjoying the freedoms of a young American girl. There she began to learn German and to peruse the works of Heine (1797–1856), Goethe (1749–1832), and Schiller (1759–1805).Awareness of the Holocaust came quite late to her as well as to other American Jews. From the 1950s to early 1970s, the majority of Jewish American writers were preoccupied with domestic affairs instead of the Holocaust that had happened in central Europe. Some writers attempted to incorporate the Jewish genocide in their novels; nevertheless, they tended to render it as marginal background rather than expose the catastrophe explicitly. Jerzy Kosinski’sThe Painted Bird(1965), Saul Bellow’sMr. Sammler’s Planet(1970), and Philip Roth’sZuckerman Bound(1979)dealt with the Holocaust superficially, cautiously, and marginally. These novels are “Holocaustinflected rather than about the Holocaustper se. These texts inscribe the Holocaust sometimes silently, sometimes marginally—often in an allusion or phrase or set of images—in their pursuit of their other, more primary agendas.”Ozick’s literary works, composed in different periods, reflect the developing consciousness of the Holocaust. “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (1969), her first novella, features a character that resembles the Jewish American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991), and makes vague references to the Holocaust. This is considered as Ozick’s first Holocaust-related story, but like most Jewish American writers, her main purpose is mourning the decline of Yiddish in America rather than commemorating the Holocaust. Then in “The Pagan Rabbi” (1971), the character of Sheindel Kornfeld bears strong similarities to Magda, the daughter inThe Shawl. Both are born in concentration camps, but only Kornfeld survives, though with an asterisk-shaped scar imprinted permanently on her cheek. InUnderstanding Cynthia Ozick(1991), Lawrence Friedman (b. 1930)points out that Holocaust imagery is “perceptible in ‘An Education’ . . . unmissable in ‘A Mercenary’ and ‘Usurpation’ . . . essential in ‘Bloodshed.’”Until then, the Holocaust still appeared as an allusion or background rather than the major theme of Ozick’s writings.
II. Breaking the Silence: Ozick and The Shawl
It is not until “The Shawl” and “Rosa” that Ozick depicts the Holocaust with a brutally immediate and straightforward manner. Her representation of the concentration camp and descriptions of its aftermath give readers the impression that she had been witness to it. Ozick mentions that she received two letters after the publication of “The Shawl,” one of which was from a psychiatrist who insisted that Ozick was a Holocaust survivor. She wrote back to correct him, but his reply was even more irritating: “He wrote something very strange; he accused me of lying, said I was delusional, told me that his patients, many of them, were so rattled and destroyed by their experiences, that they too denied this event.”Another letter was written by a Holocaust survivor who condemned Ozick for the abuse of imagination: “She found my use of imagination utterly out of place and considered it both emotionally and morally disruptive.”Ozick sided with the survivor and has herself criticized non-historical representations of the Holocaust:Finally, about writing fiction. In theory, I’m with Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum: after Auschwitz, no more poetry. And yet, my writing has touched on the Holocaust again and again. I cannotnotwrite about it. It rises up and claims my furies . . . I am not in favour of making fiction of the data, or of mythologizing or poeticizing it . . . I constantly violate this tenet; my brother’s blood cries out from the ground, and I am drawn and driven.Ozick’s practice of writing Holocaust fiction has challenged her own assertion of nonmythopoeticization: “I didn’t want to write about the Holocaust again, too much, too much, and then there she was, she came, and I couldn’t help it.”Later on, she adds: “ And yet, for some reason, I keep writing Holocaust fiction. It is something that has happened to me; I can’t help it. If I had been there and not here I would be dead, which is something I can never forget.”She recognizes her own contradiction in another interview: “I want the documents to be enough; I don’t want to tamper or invent or imagine. And yet I have done it. I can’t not do it. It comes, it invades.”With regard toThe Shawl, Ozick believes that everyone is a witness after the Holocaust, either through reading historical documents or listening to survivors’ testimonies.As a writer she prefers to witness “through acts of representation.”Nevertheless, Ozick struggles to acknowledge the authorship of the five pages of “The Shawl”:We read now and again that a person sits down to write and there’s a sense that some mystical hand is guiding you and you’re not writing out of yourself. I think reasonably, if you’re a rational person, you can’t accept that. But I did have the sense—I did this one time in my life—that I was suddenly extraordinarily fluent, and I’m never fluent. I wrote those five pages as if I heard a voice.As for the motivation of writing “Rosa,” the aftermath story of the Holocaust, Ozick insists:“I wrote the second half because I wanted to know what happened to Rosa afterward. I was curious to enter the mind of such an unhappy, traumatized person and see how that person would cope with the time afterward—rescued, saved, safe, and yet not rescued, not safe, not normal, abnormal.”
“The Shawl” (1980) and “Rosa” (1983), composed and published in the wave of Holocaust awakening in America, are Holocaust-centered rather than Holocaust-reflected. That is the first time Ozick ventured to illustrate the Holocaust in a concentration camp straightforwardly. It is also“the first time in her fiction, she told a tale directly through the consciousness of a Holocaust survivor, enshrining her as a spokeswoman for the truth.”Ozick extends her imagination into an unimaginable realm and the unfathomable mind of a traumatized survivor, which echoes her philosophy of “imagining the unimaginable.” In a mere five pages, “The Shawl” describes the horrific conditions of the concentration camp where Rosa is incarcerated with her fifteen-monthold daughter Magda and her fourteen-year-old niece Stella. It begins with the infamous death marches and ends with the brutal murder of Magda by an anonymous Nazi solider. As a sequel,“Rosa” recounts the life of Rosa Lublin in America thirty years after the Holocaust, focusing on her interactions with the “imagined” Magda, her niece Stella, and her suitor Simon Persky. The setting has been shifted from the European concentration camp to Miami, Florida.The myth of silence of Ozick coincides with that of the majority of Jewish American writers:from unawareness to awareness and from immature representations to qualified representations—that is, representations that do not “preempt” the Holocaust. The myth of silence of Rosa is comparatively more complicated. A controversial analogy has been made between Rosa’s forced silence at the sight of her young daughter’s death and American Jewry’s conservatism concerning the topic of the Holocaust.However, this plain comparison cannot fully explicate Rosa’ s“obstinate” silence that penetrates her “three lives,” namely, “the life before,” “the life during,”and “the life after”: “My niece Stella . . . says that in America cats have nine lives, but we—we’re less than cats, so we got three. The life before, the life during, the life after . . . The life after is now.The life before is our real life, at home, where we was [sic] born . . . Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie” (The Shawl, 57-58).Rosa’s “life before” is recomposed of textual details collected piece by piece from her conversations, letters, and inner monologues. In her first letter to Magda, Rosa described her “life before” in Warsaw as a bright, glorious, and intellectual life. Born into a middle-class family, she was supposed to have a promising future. Her father could pronounce the most accurate Polish and recited “nearly the whole first half of theAeneid” (69), while her mother was also an educated person whose publication of Polish poetry had gained her much respect. Her family devoted all their love and passions to Poland and its culture to the extent of neglecting their Jewish legacies.Rosa remembered her mother’s contempt for her grandmother’s Yiddish as well as her aspiration for Catholicism. She memorized one of her mother’s poems, written about the statue of the Virgin and Child, which was set up in kitchen by the housemaid. Following her parents, Rosa also dissociated herself from Judaism by claiming that she believed in mystery rather than God (41).This dichotomous attitude toward Polish and Jewish culture remains contentious throughout the novel.The family’s first identity crisis occurred, for Rosa in particular, when they were incarcerated with other Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Loyalty, education, wealth, and nobility cannot be the talisman guaranteeing their safety or the proof of their Polish identity. When imprisoned in the ghetto, instead of brewing hatred toward her beloved country, young Rosa showed more anger and disgust for her fellow Jews, which she disclosed in her second letter to Magda:
All these families used up their energies with walking up and down, and bowing, and shaking and quaking over old rags of prayer books, and their children sat on the boxes and yelled prayers, too . . . So we were furious in every direction, but most immediately we were furious because we had to be billeted with such a class, with these old Jew peasants worn out from their rituals and superstitions, phylacteries on their foreheads sticking up so stupidly, like unicorn horns, every morning (66-67).
These prejudiced and insulting comments on either Jews or Judaism render Rosa an unlovable character. She thus differs from a “traditional” victim, with whom people sympathize. Langer summarizes that “Rosa allies herself to a Polish professional and intellectual aristocracy rather than to a proud Jewish tradition, and in so doing she forfeits much of the sympathy she has gained from our knowledge of her camp ordeal.”Ozick makes clear in the first place that Rosa is not a traditional tragic heroine, and her story is not about “the triumph of the human spirit” or “the vindication of suffering through transcendence.”Ozick’s rendition of the protagonist as well as her Holocaust experience conforms to Langer’s ideology of not “preempting” the Holocaust to other higher causes or moral lessons. As Ozick repeats: “no promise, no use, no restitution and no redemption can come out of the suffering and destruction of one-third of the Jewish People.”Their stories and testimonies should not be read for catharsis.
According to Ozick, Rosa represents “the wholly acculturated Jew who belongs to the civilization into which she was born. Then the cataclysm comes and deprives her of this patrimony,which does not seem acquired (by her).”This is the second identity crisis that young Rosa encounters. As a matter of fact, quite a few European Jews have the same perspective as Rosa and her family, who are highly assimilated and loyal to their country of residence. When they were incarcerated in camps, these Jews would tend to believe that they had been labeled with a“mistaken identity.” Ozick shows sympathy for them in an interview by saying: “I think the Jews who went to their deaths not knowing why, but knowing the meaning of their lives as Jews, were in some sense more redeemed in the eyes of history than those who went with a sense of mistaken identity.”Rosa is designated by Ozick to give voice to these anonymous victims who perished in the ghetto or the death camp thinking theirs was a case of “mistaken identity.”
Rosa’s “life during” can hardly be called a “life,” resembling a limbo-like space where every human right has been deprived. Ozick spends only five pages on unfolding Rosa’s “unimaginable”experience during the death march and later in the camp. Perusing these few imaginative pages, the reader experiences powerful emotions and complex situations of coldness, hunger, stink, filth,disease, desperation, and death, along with Rosa, Stella, and Magda. The incompleteness of their names indicates the fragmentation and scattered nature of their lives during the Holocaust, which alludes to the Nazi’s notorious strategy of dehumanizing the European Jews. In “Rosa,” the aftermath story, Ozick reveals Rosa’s full name: “Rosa Lublin, a madwoman and a scavenger”(13). The family name “Lublin” embodies several meanings. In the first place, it symbolizes Jewish culture and intellectuality, because the first Yeshivain Poland was established in Lublin, a city southeast of Warsaw. Furthermore, Lublin also functions as the “headquarters” where Hebrew texts were largely printed and widely distributed before the Second World War.Moreover, Lublin is where the death camp Majdanek was located. It seems that Rosa’s fate has been predicted by her family name.
Silence in Rosa’s “life during” the Holocaust is, though harsh and tough, the only means to prolong life. In the death march as well as the camp, Rosa wraps Magda in a shawl to protect her from being discovered, and Magda survives the constant threats of malnutrition, disease, hunger,and atrocious weather. Nevertheless, her final burst of crying claims her life. Magda pays an immeasurable price for breaking the silence. For Magda, silence safeguards her for a while; for Rosa, silence saves her life in a crucial moment of life and death—that is, the moment when the Nazi soldier hurls Magda against the electrified barbed wire. That moment becomes the most polemical one in the novel. Beholding Magda’s death, Rosa is petrified and has no choice but to stuff Magda’s shawl into her mouth to silence her own screams. She tries desperately to remain reticent and immobile, knowing that “if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot” (10). Her silence pulls her through this unimaginable moment and saves her from an immediate death. Criticisms of Rosa regarding her final gesture in“The Shawl” can be succinctly summarized into two categories: a destruction of motherhood and a reflection of moral collapse or even crime. Rosa is constantly blamed for her “non-action” upon Magda’s murder, and her traumatized life in America is diagnosed as a result of her guilt for Magda’s death, which keeps haunting her.
In “ The Shawl,” the perpetrator is “ invisible.” The Nazi soldier who murders Magda is diminished as “a black body like a domino” and “a pair of black boots” (9). Few words are spent to portray the perpetrator, and, as a result, readers and critics tend to overlook the inflictor and accuse the victim of the crime. “The Shawl” is a particular story that unconsciously subjects the victim to the position of perpetrator, if read inappropriately. This is why Langer severely criticizes the analogy between the concentration camp and Dante’s inferno. Langer argues that in Dante’s inferno “the victims are also the sinners, while in Auschwitz they are not. Here, injustice prevails,and we are faced with the torment of the innocent.”Apart from the historical fact of six million murders, “the greatest crime of the Holocaust . . . is that decent men and women were often forced to violate their natures in order to stay alive.”Rosa’s example demonstrates exactly how parenthood or filial piety was violated in the Holocaust, which remain as an ambiguous and difficult issue to deal with. As Wiesel remarks, “there are no answers to such questions, only questions to such answers.”
If Rosa remains voiceless in her “life before” and “life during,” she does attempt to break the silence in her “life after”; however, her voice cannot be heard, and her efforts to break the silence are overshadowed by the indifference of American society. Her stories are, resembling those antique objects in her shop, “unmarketable.” Disappointed and frustrated, Rosa smashes her shop with a hammer, and moves alone from New York to Miami with her personal stories and burdens.Rosa feels that “the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty rib cages” (16). She aligns the street and the sun in Miami with the“furnace” and “executioner” (14), metaphors alluding to the Holocaust. Miami seems to her but an extension of the concentration camp—“Where I put myself is in hell. Once I thought the worst was the worst, after that nothing could be the worst. But now I see, even after the worst there’s still more” (14). Surviving the death camp does not guarantee the end of suffering. Rosa repeatedly complains that her life in postwar America is a joke, and to deal with this “ridiculous” life, she prefers to keep silent—an act of self-defence and passive protest. Several crucial characters interpose in Rosa Lublin’s “life after” in America—Stella the angel of death, Dr. Tree the hypocritical scholar, and Simon Persky the suitor—who function either as the accelerator for or an antidote to Rosa’s impenetrable silence.
The first sentence of “The Shawl” begins with “Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell” (3).The constant torture of hunger and an intensive sense of maternal protection for Magda directs Rosa subconsciously to contrive fantasies of cannibalism: “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’” (5). Stella is portrayed as a demonic figure in Rosa’s illusions that come to reality when Stella snatches the shawl from Magda, which inadvertently results in Magda’s death. Stella’s explanation sounds innocent and indifferent: “I was cold” (6). Stella should be condemned given her selfishness and inconsideration, but she should not become the scapegoat for the real culprit.
If Magda’ s death stimulates Rosa’s unconscious enmity toward Stella, their contradictory opinions concerning “life after” in America aggravate it to an irrevocable degree. Differing from Rosa’s nostalgia for Polish and Warsaw, Stella strives to integrate into American culture. During Rosa’s “life before”, she favored Polish over Yiddish, while in her “life after” in America, she retains her original passion for Polish and despises English as a poison that cracks her teeth (53).Stella, on the contrary, attempts to get rid of her Polish accent in order to speak English like a native. Communication between Rosa and Stella is conducted fundamentally through Rosa’s“crude” English, which hinders their further exchange, either in verbal language or in mentality.
In addition to language issue, their disparate “ideologies” toward the notion of new life become another obstacle between them. Stella was convinced that a new life had begun with their liberation and immigration to America. For Stella, there is a life after the Holocaust; however, for Rosa, “after is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie” (58). Stella advises Rosa to forget the past by saying: “Rosa, by now, believe me, it’s time, you have to have a life”. Rosa’s response is straightforward: “Thieves took it” (32). As far as Rosa is concerned, Stella’s desire for Americanization, like that of the majority of postwar American Jewry, comes at the cost of Holocaust ignorance. Stella’s amnesia of the Holocaust is revealed by her birthday present for Rosa—a piece of “fancy” dress with blue stripes: “As if innocent, as if ignorant, as if not there.Stella, an ordinary American, indistinguishable! No one could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth and up coiled the smoke of accent” (33). Rosa believes that Stella’s new life is built upon a denial of the past, which she despises and would never comply to. Their different “ideologies” and life practices render the gap between them deeper and wider.
James W. Tree, a professor from the Department of Clinical Social Pathology at the University of Kansas-Iowa, has exasperated Rosa the Holocaust survivor with letters, interviews,and experiments that compel her to keep silent rather than speak up. One of Dr. Tree’s letters travelled thousands of miles, from Iowa to New York and then to Miami, only to pursue her, like wild beast running after its prey, as conceived by Rosa who had a strong dislike to his usage of the terms “survivor” and “Humanitarian Context.” She protests against being labeled as a refugee and a survivor, instead of being treated as a human being, a woman, and a mother. Rosa believes that the title of “survivor,” like the blue numbers tattooed by the Nazis, are another tag on them thirty years after the Holocaust (36). For ordinary letters, Rosa develops an ordinary routine of disposal:“Carried the scissors over to the toilet bowl and snipped little bits of paper and flushed. In the bowl going down, the paper squares whirled liking wedding rice” (39). To destroy Dr. Tree’s letter,however, she burns it and then flushes the cinders away. Dr. Tree is the novelist’s representative of postwar American scholars who “preempt” the Holocaust and its survivors with professional analysis and statistical anatomy. Dr. Tree’s scheme of sublimating the traumatic mind with the concept of Buddhist cultivation enrages Rosa. It is his self-righteous metaphysical theory of repression that intensifies her unwillingness to unveil her personal story.
The potential change of Rosa’s “life after” commences with her encounter with Persky, a Warsaw-born Jewish immigrant. His enthusiasm and audacity “impelled” Rosa to communicate with him, appearing to be a possible breakthrough of Rosa’s long-term silence. Rosa’s attitude toward Persky fluctuates from initial rejection to passive response, and then to active engagement in conversation. Persky’s emergence enlivens the previous depressing atmosphere. When Persky discovers that they are both from Warsaw, he is eager to share his hometown memories with Rosa.Against Persky’s enthusiasm, Rosa repeats “My Warsaw isn’t your Warsaw” (19), or “Your Warsaw isn’t my Warsaw” (22). Instead of being provoked by Rosa’s constant murmurings, Persky demonstrates his sense of humor: “What is this? A song with one stanza?” (ibid.). Persky’s witty and humorous responses have, to a certain extent, a therapeutic function for Rosa. Moreover, his defense of Rosa against Stella’s accusation give Rosa a sense of security and affiliation, which is the key to opening her icebound inner self.Nevertheless, there is always a risk of making jokes about a traumatized person. In her hotel room, Rosa decides to present Persky with a box that she believes contains Magda’s shawl—the only evidence that could attest to her Holocaust experience and her motherhood. However, when they open the box, they find Dr. Tree’s book entitled Repressed Animation: A Theory of the Biological Ground of Survival. Without perceiving the change of Rosa’s emotion and the gravity of the situation, Persky continues to make fun of her: “On such a sad subject, allow me a little joke.Who came to America was one, your niece Stella; Lublin, Rosa, this makes two; and Lublin’s brain-three!” (59). Rosa’s reaction to this unexpected “discovery” and Persky’s joke is so volcanic that for the first time Persky realizes his impotence under such circumstances; nonetheless, he still ventures to persuade Rosa to move on: “But it’s over . . . You went through it, now you owe yourself something . . . You ain’t in a camp. It’s finished. Long ago it’s finished” (58).“Forgetting” is a universal diction constantly employed to comfort the Holocaust survivors. Persky has no better choice but to repeat this powerless cliché. Their conversation ends with Rosa’s furious explosion. Rosa’s final defense of rationality is devastated upon beholding the book, and her violent outburst frightens Persky who understands that he is “involved in a mistake” (61). The second morning when Rosa receives the real box with Magda’s shawl, she appears unexpectedly calm and composed. She does not “conjure up” Magda immediately; instead, she makes a distant call to Stella after a long time. She even considers the idea of going back to New York City and reopening her shop. However, Magda is “resurrected” during Rosa’s phone-call conversation with Stella. At this critical moment, the bell rings and Persky reappears at the door, which awakens Rosa from the daydreaming and fantasy. The end of story remains ambiguous, but it concludes on a more tranquil note and indicates the potential breakthrough of Rosa’s obstinate silence.As far as Rosa is concerned, the silence of her “life before” in Warsaw is induced from her disdain of Jewish tradition and her arrogance towards uneducated Polish people. Silence in “life during” the Holocaust functions as a “talisman” for Rosa, as breaking the silence would incur death in the concentration camp. Rosa’s silence in “life after” in America serves as the poignant protest against the postwar American Jewry’s silence and the general public’s indifference to the Holocaust. Silence is both a shelter and a weapon for Rosa. Ozick’s characterization of Rosa’s silence throughout her “three lives” and the implication of Rosa’s intention to speak up at the end is in accord with Ozick’s personal endeavor to break the silence by means of qualified literary representation of the Holocaust. It is noteworthy that Ozick’s strategies for achieving this come fundamentally from her Jewish traditions that provide her with inspirations and methods for remembering and appropriating the Holocaust without “preempting” the catastrophe to metaphysical essences or pragmatical purposes.
III. Jewish Legacies for Remembering the Holocaust: Zakhor, midrash, and“Pure Intention”
The unprecedented nature of the Holocaust in human history renders any literary representation or aesthetic appropriation of the event an extremely contentious issue. As Christopher Browning claims:I believe that the Holocaust was a watershed event in human history—the most extreme case of genocide that has yet occurred. What distinguishes it from other genocides are two factors: first the totality and scope of intent—that is, the goal of killing every last Jew, man,woman, child, throughout the reach of the Nazi empire; and second, the means employed—namely, the harnessing of the administrative and technological capacities of a modern nation state and Western scientific culture.Commentators such as Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), and Berel Lang (b. 1933) maintain a similar opinion that it is unethical and inadequate to represent the Holocaust.Adorno’s stern injunction, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,”which first appeared in his 1949 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” has been constantly quoted as a powerful support for counter-representation, despite the fact that he later modified his statement by saying that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream;hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”On the other hand, since 1945, various forms of Holocaust representation have been written and produced either by Holocaust survivors or non-survivors, which facilitate the formation of a new literary genre called Holocaust literature. Ozick, inheriting the Jewish doctrine ofZakhor, the midrashic style of narrative, and the Hasidic legend about “pure intention,” manages to contrive her own writing strategies for Holocaust representation.The idea of remembrance, orZakhorin Hebrew, is deeply rooted in Judaism.Shema Yisrael,the central prayer of Judaism, clearly states the obligation of memorization and transmission:Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Alluding to this prayer, Levi, in the epigraph to his autobiographyIf This Is a Man(1987),emphasizes the importance of remembering the Holocaust as well as the necessity of transmitting the memory of this catastrophe to future generations:Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
Levi applies this Jewish commandment to tell people: “If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative.”Wiesel likewise criticizes anyone who “does not actively, constantly engage in remembering and in making others remember” the Holocaust as “an accomplice of the enemy.”Representing the Holocaust remains an unsolved issue and the “greatest paradox,” as Rosen put forward:
If the writer treats the subject, the risk is that it may be falsified, trivialized. Even a“successful” treatment of the subject risks an aestheticizing or a false ordering of it, since whatever is expressed in art conveys the impression that it, too, is subject to the laws of composition. Yet not to write means omitting the central event of the twentieth century.
Apart from the abovementioned disputes and controversies, Ozick confronts another internal obstacle about Holocaust representation, that is, her early belief that the act or work of imagination is itself a form of idolatry, which is strongly prohibited in Judaism: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”Ozick, in her essay “Literature as Idol,” expresses the idea of “Jewish writing as an oxymoron: the clash of monotheism with image-making, the poet as Godcompetitor.”She explains that when writing a novel, Jewish writers take the risk of entering the realm of idolatry. Nevertheless, she later changes her perceptions of imagination and idolatry:
Though the imagination does lead to the making of images, twist it up higher, require more of the imagination, put more pressure on it—and then and only then can you have monotheism. Because monotheism requires the highest possible imagination—in order to imagine that which no image can be made of, that which you cannot see, smell, touch. To imagine the unimaginable requires the hugest possible imagination.
Ozick struggles to reconcile literature—or imagination, to be more precise—with Judaic monotheism. Nevertheless, in her opinion, not every act of imagination is qualified; “a thingness imagination,” “an art imagination,” “a systems imagination,” and “a mammalian imagination”can result in idol-making as well, and only “the imagination that can imagine the unimaginable”will not violate the Jewish law.Based on this dictum, she discourages Jewish writers from making fiction out of their own experience, but instead to imagine the unimaginable.In order to imagine the unimaginable and to reproduce the Holocaust in an appropriate manner, Ozick experiments with a midrashic style of writing inThe Shawl. Midrash is a type of traditional Jewish literature whose function is to “fill in the gaps” of biblical narratives that are“gapped and dialogical.”Midrash usually “takes the form of fiction,” and in addition to the function of textual exegesis, it can also be applied to mediate “the intellectual distances between sacred scripture and a present.”In this sense, the second story “Rosa” is generally considered as a midrashic commentary to “The Shawl.”Midrash is capable of handling any kind of topic, from trivial daily accounts to deep contemplations, and thus it proves to be an “adequate” form of narrative to look back on and represent the Holocaust.Ozick’s midrashic renderings ofThe Shawlare recounted as follows: (1)Ozick collapses narrative distance to bring readers inside the experience of characters; (2) she adheres her story to historical facts; (3) she adopts “silence and muteness to symbolize the ineffability of the crimes during the Holocaust”; (4) she turns Magda’s shawl into the most significant symbol in the story while the shawl itself embodies many meanings in Jewish tradition such as the prayer shawl and the shroud.Ozick’s experimental employment of midrashic style, to a great extent, alleviates the tension between representation and non-representation as well as the scared and the secular.The last procedure to legitimate Ozick’s fictional appropriation of the Holocaust as a nonsurvivor requires the “assistance” from a Hasidic legend about the Ba’al Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name,” 1698–1760), which is illustrated in the preface toThe Call of Memory(2008):According to the legend, the Ba’al Shem Tov knew a prayer that was to be recited at a specific time and place on a flame that was lit in the heart of a forest; a prayer that would be heard by G-d and had the power to prevent a disaster. After the Ba’al Shem Tov passed away,his student was asked to follow in his footsteps. The student knew the timing and the place of the prayer and even knew how to kindle the fire, but, alas, he did not know the prayer itself;nevertheless, this sufficed. His prayer was heard and answered by G-d, and a disaster was averted. When this student passed away, the student’s student had to carry out the task. He did not know the exact place in the forest, nor the timing of the prayer. He did not know the prayer itself, but he did have the right intention. This pure intention, which relied on the teachings of his predecessors, helped him devise his own prayer, and this sufficed for the prayer to be heard and the disaster was once again prevented.The prayer of Ba’al Shem Tov resembles the testimonies of Wiesel, Levi, Delbo, and Viktor Frankl(1905–1997), belonging to the category of first-hand materials. Art Spiegelman’s (b. 1948) graphic versions of the Holocaust are based upon his father’s Holocaust experience, which correspond to the prayer practiced by the student of Ba’al Shem Tov. Ozick is neither a Holocaust survivor nor a so-called second-generation survivor, which means she does not know the “prayer”per sebut has to contrive her own device of representation with the “pure intention” of bearing and transmitting witness to further generations. To prevent the awareness of Holocaust from fading away in the historical arena, more and more writers who harbor the “pure intention” should be encouraged to carry on transmitting the facts with appropriate forms and approaches.Langer’s concept of “preempting” the Holocaust coincides with the notion of “impure intention.”The Shawlis an important Holocaust novel written with “pure intention” by Ozick without the appeal to “preempt” the Holocaust to achieve moral redemption. However controversial it might be, in order to combat forgetfulness and denial of this genocide, it is imperative to translate this event into words rather than remain silent. The living memory kept by Holocaust survivors are endangered by the reality of aging; as a consequence, more modalities of Holocaust representation should be created in order to maintain and enrich the dossier of Holocaust studies, including historical document, first-hand testimony, and aesthetic adaptation, under the condition that they are composed with “pure intention.”
IV. Conclusion
This essay does not merely aim to construct a so-called Benjaminian constellation or a mosaic juxtaposition of a multitude of silences, whether historical, ethical, personal, or fictional. Instead,the objective is to show the reciprocal influence and mutual intertwining between historical context, the author, and the work, and to argue that Ozick, withThe Shawl, perform a positive act of breaking the silence. This essay anatomizes the myth of silence permeating the postwar Jewish American community. Due to religious, historical, and socio-political reasons, American Jewry is generally accused of Holocaust amnesia or Holocaust indifference in the postwar era. Even when certain commemorations and representations were organized and produced, these memorial activities and literary works were often embedded with “impure intention,” and thus had the risk of“preempting” the Holocaust. Ozick, as a Jewish American writer living through this contentious period, also experienced the transition from shunning the Holocaust to confronting it steadfastly.Ozick’s “manifesto” of breaking the silence is represented byThe Shawl, which depicts the Holocaust survivor Rosa’s traumatic “three lives” of silence as well as her final gesture of reconnection with society. To better comprehend Ozick’s dilemma of imagining and representing the Holocaust, it is fundamental to situate the author’s personal experience under a broader historical, cultural, and political purview, which also suffices to explicate Rosa’s stubborn silence during her “life after” in postwar America. Meanwhile, the subtle transition of postwar American Jews’ attitudes toward the Holocaust could be reflected obliquely through the micro-lens of Ozick’s personal change and Rosa’s potential breakthrough of silence. As a consequence, by means of synthesizing historical research and textual analysis, this essay manages to decipher the mythical silence of the postwar Jewish American community from manifold perspectives, and also to illustrate the efficient and effective strategies employed by Ozick to represent and appropriate the Holocaust without falling into the wrong path of “preempting” this unprecedented calamity in human history.
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