Read and Respond to Cynthia Ozick's "the Shawl"
"The Shawl"
past Cynthia Ozick
Instructor Linda Rosenkranz
dein goldenes Haar Margarete ein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith ein aschenes Haar Sulamith
Paul Celan, ul Celan, Todesfuge Todesfuge
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tella, cold, common cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled upwardly between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda. But she was jealous of Magda . A thin girl of fourteen, too small, westwardith thin breasts of her own, Stella wanted to be westrapped in a shawl, hidden abroad, comatose, rocked past the march, a baby, a round baby in arms. Magda took Rosa's nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; so she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones. Rosa did not feel hunger ; she felt light , not like someone walking but lik e someone in a faint, in trance , arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, only in the air, not there, not touching the r oad. Equally if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. She looked into Magda's face through a gap in the shawl : a squirrel in a nest, safe, no 1 could reach her inside the trivial house of the shawl's windings. The face, ve r y round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa'southward bleachiliad complex
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ion, dark similar cholera, it was another kind of confront altogether, eyes blue as air, smoothen feathers of hair nearly as yellow every bit the Star sewn into Rosa's coat.
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You could think she was one of
their
babiedue south. Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda abroad in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push button Magda into the hands of whatever woman on the side of the road. Just if she moved out of line, they might shoot. And even if she fled the line for one-half a 2nd and pushed the shawl
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bundle at a stranger, would the woman have it? She might be surprised, or agape; she might drop the shawl, and Magda would fall out and strike her caput and die. The piddling round head. Such a skillful child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now just for the gustation of the drying nipple itself. The swell grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking upwardly in the bottom glue, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without lament, Magda relinquished Rosa'due south teats, first the left, then the right; both were croaky, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, bullheaded middle, chill pigsty, and so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl's good flavour, milk of linen.
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"Your golden pilus, Margarete / your ashen hair, Shulamith." Paul Celan was the pseudon y k of Paul Ancel (1920-1970), a Jewish Romanian poet. He was imprisoned in a forced labor military camp during World State of war Ii and after wrote (in German) powerful verse near the fate of the Jews in the war.
Todesfuge
(D e ath Fugue) is a surrealistic verse form about the Holocaust, pub l ished in 1952 .
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The Nazis forced Jews to clothing Stars of David, mad e of yellow cloth, sewn onto their clothes.
Information technology
was a magic shawl. It could nourish an infant for 3 days and three nights. Magda did non die. She stayed alive, although very repose. A peculiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth .
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She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap, and Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness. On the road they raised i burden of a leg after some other and studied Magda'south confront. "Aryan," Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string, and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a immature carnivorous. And the time that Stella said "Aryan," it sounded to Rosa every bit if Stella had really said "Permit u.s.a. devour her." Only Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, simply she did not walk very well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly considering the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat abdomen.
It
was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her nutrient to Magda, Stella gave nothing; Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, merely not growing much. Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but likewise not; she learned from Magda how to beverage the taste of a finger in i's mouth. They were in a identify without pity. All pity was annihilated in Rosa; she looked at Stella'due south bones without pity. She was certain that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs. Rosa knew Magda was going to dice very shortly; she should accept been dead already, but she had been buried away deep within the magic shawl, mistaken in that location for the shivering mound of Rosa's breasts; Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered just herself. No one took it abroad from her. Magda was mute. She never cried. Rosa hid her in the billet, nether the shawl, but she knew that one mean solar day someone would inform; or one 24-hour interval someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her. When Magda began to walk, Rosa knew that Magda was going to dice very presently, something would happen. She was agape to fall comatose; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda'south trunk; she was afraid she would smother Magda nether her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less; Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air. Magda was tranquillity, but her eyes were horribly live, similar blue tigers. She watched. Sometimes she laughed - information technology seemed a express joy, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh. Still, Magda laughed at her shawl when the wind blew its corners, the bad wind with pieces of black in it, that made Stella's and Rosa'southward eyes tear. Magda's eyes were always clear and tearless. She
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The smell of cinnamon and almonds assembly the shawl with the
besamin
(spice) box which Jews sniff on the Sabbath equally part of the
havadalah
anniversary. The shawl itself is coordinating to the
tallit,
or prayer shawl, besides used in Jewish ritual.
Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/53251930/The-Shawl-Full-Text
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