"The Shawl"

“The Shawl” is a very small, unique, and extremely powerful story written by Cynthia Ozick. It’s a small story, but there are so many details that are hard to follow. I found it hard to keep up everything in my mind when I was reading it. It’s a very emotional story of a mother, her daughter, and her fourteen years old niece. I would call this story, “a Magda’s story”, because it’s really about her life and death. Rosa is Magda’s mother and just like every other mother she was trying really hard to protect her daughter from the guards. Magda is only few months old and a very unique child. She is a good child, she wouldn’t cry at all and also I think she had some sort of disabilities and because of them she didn’t act like a normal child. “Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb”. Even then, I think Magda was a good child and because of her innocence she survived for some time at the camps. Rosa loved her daughter a lot just like any other mothers and that’s why she always had fear that Magda was going to die soon. Fear of Magda’s death was making her really weak. She couldn’t take care of herself. “She was afraid to fall asleep; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda’s body”. I feel really bad for Rosa, who lived a life of fear of losing her child. She knew that if the soldiers find her baby, Madga’s dead and that was the reason that she would always keep Magda wrapped in the shawl, which has been protecting Magda for months. But, she didn’t know that her own kin will deceive her. Stella who was always jealous of Magda and wanted to be wrapped in the shawl that Magda was wrapped in. She was the one of the reasons that caused Magda’s death, because she took the shawl away from her. Because Madga didn’t have the shawl around her, guards found out about her and threw her into the electrified fence. Even Rosa couldn’t do anything, because if she had gone to save her, she would’ve ended up dyeing also. She was not able to do anything. So, she took Magda’s shawl and put it into her mouth and tried to feel her Magda in it. “She filled her mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until dried”. I think Rosa suffered a lot. She was a very helpless mother, who couldn’t even do anything else rather than feeling Magda in the shawl. “The Shawl” which was probably the savior of Madga, but at the end it was also the reason of Magda’s death. I think the author called this story “The Shawl”, because the shawl was the protector of Magda, but it was also the reason that took a daughter away from her mother. Overall, I think it a good story. It has a lot innocence of a relationship of a mother and daughter. Even though they were in the camps, but they were very close to each other. It was the reason that Magda’s first word was Ma. It shows that no matter where you are, a relationship of a mother and a daughter is always strong.