The Shawl: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Shawl: Analysis of Major Characters" explores the profound emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust through its central characters: Rosa Lubin, her infant daughter Magda, and her niece Stella. Rosa, a Polish refugee in a Nazi concentration camp, is portrayed as a figure stripped of humanity, whose primary concern is to protect her daughter, Magda. Despite her horrific circumstances, Rosa experiences a trance-like state, feeling detached from her pain as she desperately attempts to keep Magda alive. Magda, a symbol of innocence, finds some comfort in the shawl that Rosa uses to conceal her; however, her life ends tragically due to a moment of desperation from Stella, who takes the shawl to warm herself.
Stella, at fourteen, embodies the instinct for survival but becomes indirectly responsible for the catastrophic loss of her cousin. The narrative shifts decades later, where an older Rosa grapples with her past and the haunting memory of Magda, whom she imagines leading a life as a philosophy professor. The story also introduces Simon Persky, who represents a potential connection for Rosa as he seeks to help her confront her isolation. Through these characters, the text delves into themes of trauma, loss, and the struggle to form human connections amidst the shadow of past atrocities. This analysis illuminates the complexities of survivor guilt and the haunting nature of memory within the context of historical brutality.
The Shawl: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Cynthia Ozick
First published: 1980 (revised, with the novella Rosa in The Shawl, 1989)
Genre: Short fiction
Locale: Germany and Miami, Florida
Plot: Psychological realism
Time: The 1940's and early 1980's
Rosa Lubin, a young Polish refugee in a Nazi concentration camp with her infant, Magda, and her fourteen-year-old niece, Stella. They have been so brutalized that they are hardly recognizable as human. Rosa feels no hunger or pain, but rather light, as if she were an angel in a trance. Her only concern is to keep Magda concealed and thus alive. When Magda is discovered and her life is in danger, Rosa can do nothing but watch in horrified silence.
Magda, Rosa's infant daughter, who has the swollen belly of the starving. Because she can get no nourishment from Rosa's dried-up breasts, she sucks on the corner of a shawl, which seems to have some sort of magic power to comfort and sustain her. Because of her Aryan appearance, it seems clear that Magda is the result of Rosa being raped by one of the Nazi guards. Rosa loves her nevertheless and tries desperately to hide her. Magda maintains absolute silence until Stella steals her shawl to warm her own body; Magda stumbles into the open camp yard crying out for it. In a horrifying poetic passage, with Rosa watching in anguish but unable to do anything, a Nazi guard throws Magda into an electrified fence. She dies instantly.
Stella, Rosa's fourteen-year-old niece, the indirect cause of Magda's death when she takes away her shawl. She is so close to death from starvation and exposure that she can think of no one but herself.
Rosa Lubin, now a fifty-eight-year old woman. She smashes the contents of the secondhand furniture store she ran in New York City and moves to Miami, Florida, to live alone in a tenement hotel. More than thirty years after the death of her infant daughter Magda in the concentration camp, Rosa tries to stay isolated from others. Her only communication is with the imagined Magda and the hated Stella, to whom she still refers as the “Angel of Death.” After a nightmarish journey in Miami, looking for a pair of underpants lost when doing her laundry, she, with the help of the elderly Mr. Persky, tries to free herself of her fantasies about Magda and the magic shawl and begin human relationships again.
Magda, Rosa's infant daughter, who was killed by a Nazi prison guard in “The Shawl.” Rosa imagines that she is still alive and a professor of philosophy at Columbia University in New York.
Stella, who is now forty-nine years old. She remains unmarried and lives and works in New York. She sends money to Rosa and tries to make her give up her fantasy of Magda still being alive and her conviction that the shawl is somehow magical. At Rosa's request, Stella mails the shawl to her.
Simon Persky, a seventy-one-year old interested in Rosa. He flirts with her and tries to bring her out of her isolation. At one point, Rosa mistakenly thinks he has stolen a pair of her underpants from a laundromat. At the end of the story, in a gesture of new communication, Rosa allows Simon to come to her hotel room. This gesture drives away the fantasy of Magda.
Dr. James Tree, a sociologist who wants to interview Rosa for a study he is doing of survivors of the Nazi camps.