Reenacting trauma: the encounter with silence, symbol and memory in cynthia ozick’s the shawl

Against her profound belief in the inadequacy of any fictional work to perfectly represent the Holocaust, Cynthia Ozick wrote her novella The Shawl under the inexorable pressure imposed by her sense of belonging to the collective memory of Jewish suffering. But, unlike most of the Holocaust fiction, the two stories of The Shawl and Rosa do not so much integrate historical records of what actually happened, as much as they dramatically reenact the whole agony within a symbolic framework. Torn between the desires to retain silence and to let the world know, and between the nightmarish experience of the Holocaust and the surrealistic encounter with its memory, the stories use, evocative symbols that give the fictional world created by Ozick, its own fictive authenticity, making it as paradoxically close to and distant from the historical event. This paper shall examine the above-mentioned aspects of Ozick’s imaginative experience of the Holocaust, concluding how she could reconcile between two contradictory impulses: the impulse to keep the sacred intact and the counter impulse to unload the burden of expressing the self.