SOURCE: Kauver, Elaine M. “The Magic Shawl.” In Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention, pp. 179-202. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Kauver investigates how themes from Ozick's earlier writings both reoccur and change in The Shawl.

A writer who resists finality is a writer whose imagination is given over to a habit of many sidedness and multiplicity. Having concluded The Cannibal Galaxy and “The Laughter of Akiva” in Miami, Florida, with Joseph Brill and Reuben Karpov inhabiting at the end of their lives a metaphoric hell of their own devising, Ozick begins “The Shawl” and “Rosa,” which she wrote during the same period, with Rosa Lublin first in the demonic hell of the Nazi death camps and then in the continuing hell of their aftermath. Initially published separately—“The Shawl” in 1980 and “Rosa” in 1983—before they appeared in a single volume in 1989, the two stories...