Jeremy Feliz Delgado

Prof. Kayle Nochomovitz

FIQWS: 10115

February 17, 2020

I was Cold

            The Shawl is a short story of Rosa, her baby daughter Magda and her niece Stella while they were in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Stella’s character is very interesting as the author uses her lack of emotion to show the audience how the holocaust changed people.  

Since the beginning of the story, when Rosa, Stella, and Magda were on their way to the concentration camp we can clearly see that Stella didn’t have any good feelings or intentions towards Magda, even though she was her cousin. Stella’s character is not very well developed, we only know that she was a very skinny 14-year-old girl trying to survive the holocaust. Therefore, we can’t tell if something happened before so that Stella felt this way towards Magda. In the first few lines of the story, the narrator tells us that “she was jealous of Magda” (Ozick 3) referring to Stella. This wasn’t such a wild feeling since anyone would prefer to be carried in a warm shawl in this situation instead of having to walk in the cold. But as the story goes on, we get more information on Stella’s intentions with Magda as Rosa describes Stella’s look at Magda “like a young cannibal” (5). Towards the end of the story, we can see how Magda is killed for Stella’s decision of taking away the shawl from Magda and falling asleep.

The most thought-provoking part of this situation is the lack of emotion in Stella’s response to Magda’s death, “I was cold” (6), that is all she said, no sign of regret or guilt. I don’t think that Stella’s intention when she took the shawl was for Magda to die, but the way she reacts is what amazes me. The first time that I read this it was very hard for me to understand how you can basically cause your cousin’s death and not feel anything. But the second time I read this I realized that the author was using Stella to show how a young girl that is supposed to symbolize innocence is transformed by the holocaust into a heartless person.

            When Cynthia Ozick wrote this story, she was taking the risk of her work being rejected specially by holocaust survivors and their families. She took a real and very tragic event where many people were killed and made a fictional story about it. Adding to this is the fact that she didn’t go through the holocaust but instead was in the United States living a “normal” childhood. Although many people might believe that she didn’t have the right to write this story, I appreciate that she did since it allows people that aren’t Jewish or that don’t know a lot about this matter to learn from it. This text fits in a course of American Jewish Literature since it was written by a Jewish-American writer who was born and raised in the United States yet still wrote about Jews and the holocaust. This shows the impact that the holocaust had since even American Jews who didn’t experience it had the need to talk/write about it.

Works Cited

Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. Reprint, Vintage, 1990.