Shut Up and Survive

The Shawl is less a story and more an indictment.

On a painfully basic level, it's an indictment against the Nazis. It's even an indictment against the Jews themselves - "Aryan," Stella said, in a voice grown thin as string, and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal" - whose thirst for vengeance outweighed their desire to survive, to remember, to impart knowledge to those afterwards. To never forget to remember "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." It's an indictment against Europeans, too, whose inaction is to blame for much of the pain exacted against minorities during Hitler's ascendancy. It's a subtle indictment against Americans. But most of it all, the short story levels it's criticisms at the Germans who hid. The Germans who were 'just following orders'. The Germans who did not speak up. The Germans who plunged their faces into their "magic shawls" to shield themselves from what was really going on in their country. The short story's title, itself, is an ironic and pointedly sardonic jab at the non-Nazi Germans tendency to obfuscate themselves in the face of self-terrorism. It's always even easier to hide rather than fight. The Shawl isn't so much a shawl as it is a symbol. To Ozick, the inactive Germans might as well have been Nazis themselves.

The character Magda is an allegory for the quiet Germans. Is it any coincidence that Ozick dedicates much of the few pages within to explaining what Magda looks like, in addition to clearly showing Rosa and Stella's reactions to the child's appearance? Ozick doesn't even describe Rosa, and while Stella's appearance is clearer to the audience, we are only shown generalities like "knobbiness" and "coldness" rather than specifics, as is the case with Magda. The thoughts of the author, as well as the thoughts of the two thinking characters, are heavily focused on "the face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could think she was one of their babies." When an author devotes an entire paragraph towards describing a character's teeth as "an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there," the audience better pay attention to what the writer is doing here. Magda could have been a German based on appearances alone and, considering her tendency to "suck air" often, she was, at least symbolically.

According to Rosa, "Magda was mute," and "she never cried." It isn't coincidental that the first time Magda opens up her mouth is when the shawl, an oppressive symbol, is taken away from her by Stella. "Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling," describes Rosa as her child wanders vulnerably into the open. Magda isn't just talking, either. She's howling. This is behavior usually reserved for performance poets like Allen Ginsberg; not babies. Rosa even subconsciously recognizes this fact, because she fears that "Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again." It visualizes a turning point in the behavior of both Rosa and Magda. Rosa begins to see how important the voice, and speaking out is in regards to individuality; Magda begins to develop a voice of her own. Of course, the penalty for speaking out is death, and it isn't a painless lesson for Rosa when she watches a soldier toss her child into an electric fence. Ozick is commenting, indirectly, on the nature of shutting up and surviving - if it can really be considered survival - and speaking one's mind but dying corporeally. Through incredibly Though Stella is indeed viewed by Rosa as a cruel person, she is incidentally the reason behind Magda developing singularity, individualism, her own voice - "it was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosa's nipples." Without Stella, Magda never would have had the experience to speak her mind, nor would she have been killed by a soldier during that point. We are essentially asked to question which fate would have been better for Magda: speak up and die, or remain quiet and survive. It isn't an easy decision to make.