The Cloth of Life

The Cloth of Life

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Given the vast expanse of subject area and effected people the Holocaust encompasses, it was in some ways refreshing to see a more narrowed yet no less powerful take on the event. Ozick takes the opposite position as most when discussing this event, ascribing an infinite expanse of sorrow and pain to the smallest objects and briefest experiences.

Told from the perspective of a young Jewish mother, Rosa, The Shawl takes the pain and loss that the event has created for her family, and distills it down into a reduction of a family unit to its most basic needs. These needs are not met by captors represented only as “…a helmet, a black body, and a pair of black boots” (Ozick, 9). This description is telling in that it distils those who have control over Rosa into their most basic, robotic format. There are not soft edges, no leniency, and no chance for escape or return to normal. Instead, the only thought going through her head constantly that if she does anything, she will be unequivocally shot. In this way she and her two charges, Stella and baby Magda, are forced to become much the same as their captors-robotic, uncaring, and looking after themselves first, and others second. Clearly baby Magda is unable to do this forced censorship for herself, even the simple act of remaining quiet in the face of captors seems impossible for an infant. Yet Ozick introduces the element of the Shawl, and through this the improbability of life where it by all means should have long been snuffed out exists, in the form of inextricably surviving baby Magda.

Clearly the most prominent and overarching object in the story is the shawl itself. Ozick devotes more description of it or having to do with it than anything else in the text. Not to say that this is saying a tremendous amount due to the brevity of the story alone, but the entirety of the plot does seem to revolve around this one object. For Thus, it should be argued that the shawl in this story is meant to represent this culture, this family, and these individuals most basic humanity in the form of an otherwise common object. However in this place and at this time the shelter that it has to offer, the smells, the textures, are all anything but commonplace. It represents the difference between life and death. With it, even a newborn can miraculously survive, yet without it they may die. This seems to be an allusion to the power and importance of maintaining one’s own culture and who they are despite the current surroundings. The idea of shawl could have been represented by any number of objects; the point is that without it, or by giving in to the soul crushing environment, you are as good as dead

This point is clearly illustrated by the variety of forms that death takes when Stella at long last steals the life giving shell that is the shawl from Magda. Magda immediately wanders directly to her doom on the electric fence, powerfully illustrated by Ozick “her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling” (Ozick 10). Thus the “steel voices” of uniform robotic doom have claimed the first of the family. Rosa looses her voice, her will to cry out, to collect the remains of her child our of fear, fear for the same fate and the end of what remains of life at this point. Thus she suffers another form of death. Finally Stella, taking away her kin’s shawl suffered a form of death. She took the cloth not have been due to her own situation, but out of sheer jealousy for the situation of Magda. She realized that Magda's relative imperiousness to the conditions in concentration camp were directly relating to the fact that she possessed the shawl. Thus taking it would give her an escape physically (cold) and mentally (happiness or remembrance of a time before the war. However, by finally succumbing to an act that she knew would kill her own family member out of selfish disregard due to the dehumanizing situation she was put in, she lost touch with her humanity, and suffered a form of death as well.