Magda In The Shawl By Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is a well known American author who has written about the Jewish life in America, but she has also covered topics in other genres. In Cynthia’s writings she has a main focus on the Holocaust, just like in “The Shawl”. “The Shawl” was placed during the Holocaust, and focuses on a mother, a baby, and the mother's niece. Ozick begins the story with the narrator describing Rosa who is carrying Magda while walking through the streets to their camp during the Holocaust. The story goes on to describe the frailness of their bodies, but Magda’s characteristics were different. Magda is described to have smooth features and “The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face” (Ozick 4). The narrator describes how Magda is wrapped up in the shawl, and the state that the characters are in. The narrator describes Rosa, who is on the brink of death, “…She felt light, not like someone walking, but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel” (Ozick 3).The book goes on to explain how Magda is surviving, even though Rosa ran out milk to feed her child. …show more content…
The three words I would describe this book. The story sent the reader on an emotional journey, mainly with a mother and her daughter during the Holocaust. Even if the reader was not a mother, they could still put themselves in her position. A position which is truly terrifying, and one that would send anyone through a mental breakdown. The torture the characters were put through, their bodies becoming skeletons from not having enough food, these things were the small details Ozick included and described. She put detail into every sentence of the book. The reader could close their eyes and imagine themselves as Rosa carrying Magda under a Shawl. The book, for me, was about how such a small object like a shawl could protect someone for so long until they abandoned it. Magda was safe, she was safe until the end when she left the