The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick

Audiobook (almost)

Summary and analysis (video)

Summary and analysis (text)

Conversartion with Cynthia Ozick

A Book Club meeting about The Shawl

BIOGRAPHY AND SUMMARY,

by Teresa Creixell

Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
She was born in New York City on April 17, 1928, and raised in the Bronx. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and owned a pharmacy.
She attended Ohio University where she completed her bachelor’s degree in English literature, focusing on the novels by Henry James.
She was married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, until his death in 2017. Their daughter, Raquel Hallote, directs a Jewish studies program at SUNY Purchase.
Her literary works have been acquired by Yale University.
Ozick’s fiction and essays often deal with the lives of American Jews, but she also writes about politics, history, and literary criticism. She has also written and translated poetry.
The Holocaust is also a dominant theme. For example, in Who Owns Anne Frank? she writes that the true meaning of the diary has been distorted.
She has been nominated for the Nobel Prize.
 
The Shawl
 
The Shawl is an unforgettable and heartbreaking short story published in the New Yorker in 1980. Ozick later included it in a novel about the main character, Rosa, in a single volume also titled The Shawl.
She felt compelled to write The Shawl after reading a sentence in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960.
In later years, Ozick said that her short story was not a document, it was an imagination.
The story is written in the third person and is full of metaphors.
 
SUMMARY
 
The story takes place during the Holocaust.
A mother, Rosa, was walking with her baby, Magda, between her breasts, and her 14-year-old niece Stella. They were very hungry and were in a line of prisoners heading towards a Nazi concentration camp. The soldiers did not know that Magda existed.
Rosa breastfeeds her daughter with the little milk she has and wraps her close to her in her shawl. Stella is jealous of Magda’s shawl; she also wants to be protected.
Rosa is no longer hungry, she feels as if she is fainting, in a trance.
She looks at her daughter inside the shawl, her fair skin is so different from hers, her blue eyes and yellow hair like the star embroidered on the coat. She looks “Aryan”.
She would like to leave Magda in one of the villages they pass through, but she cannot move beyond the line or she will be shot, and she does not know if a woman would really take Magda. It’s not worth the risk.
Rosa no longer has milk, but the shawl is magical, it can feed Magda for 3 days and 3 nights. Magda doesn’t move, she’s alive but she’s very still and quiet.
At 15 months, Magda knows how to walk, and her mother knows that the soldiers will soon discover her, but it’s Stella who takes off her shawl when Magda was still in the barracks, where her mother had left her.
From outside, Rosa sees her daughter walking around looking for the shawl, and Magda shouts “maa..”
Rosa is scared, but at the same time happy because she hears her voice ―she thought she was mute.
The mother gets the shawl, Stella was cold and had covered herself with it.
She goes out to the square and, in the most tragic moment of the story, Rosa sees how, far away, a soldier throws her daughter against the electric fence. The girl is shouting “mama!”
Rosa puts the shawl in her mouth to suppress her own cries.

QUESTIONS

Besides the Holocaust, what other genocides do you know about? Tell us a bit of information about one you know.

In your opinion, how can the human being become a mass murderer?

What do you know about Hannah Arendt?

In your view, were all Germans guilty / responsible for the Nazi regime? Or only a part of them?

Is Stella responsible for Magda's death?

VOCABULARY

sore, ravenous, teetering, windingsm fled, gums, cinnamon, spindles, thighs, flopped, roll-call, devoid, windpipe, ash-stippled, lice, whimper, shins, turd-braids, whip, goblet, domino

A Lecture Tour, by Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun at the Wikipedia

A Lecture Tour: analysis

Knut Hamsun, by Dora Sarrión 

Biography

 
Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen in Lom, in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway, in 1859. He was the fourth of seven children. His family were very poor, so, when he was three, they moved to Hamarøy in Nordland County, to farm a land of an uncle.
At the age of nine, he was sent to live with his uncle Hans Olsen, who used to beat and starve him. Later, Hamsun stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874, he escaped from his miserable life, back to Lom; for the next five years he did any job for money: he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, and an elementary-school teacher.
At 17, he became a ropemaker's apprentice; and, although he had almost no formal education, he started to write. He asked the businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908).
He left Norway for the United States twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. There, he travelled and worked in various jobs, falling in every project he began. His bitter experience in the American territory led him to write in 1889 a book full of negative comments about the life in that country, From the Spiritual Life of Modern America.
Although this was his first writing, it wouldn’t be released until his next novel, Hunger, was published in 1890. This semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in Kristiania (now Oslo), the Norwegian capital.
Hunger introduced the typical structure of Knut Hamsun stories: a nomadic protagonist who does not fit in with the people around him, who seeks to return to his origin, drawing inspiration from his own experiences.
Following the success of this novel, there were many other interesting works: Mysteries (1892), Victoria (1898), Under the Autumn Star (1906), A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909) and Wayfarer (1929).
Hamsun achieved his greatest popularity in 1917 with his publication The Blessing of the Earth. Thanks to this work, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1920.
In 1898, he married Bergljot Göpfert, with whom he had a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1906. Three years later, he married Marie Andersen, who was 23 years younger than him. They had four children.
Hamsun had strong anti-English views, and openly supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Due to his professed support to the German occupation of Norway, he was charged with treason after the war. In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. 
During the more than 70 years in which he was writing, he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays, and some of his works have been the basis of 25 films and television miniseries adaptations.
Hamsun is considered to be “one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years” and “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun”. He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
 
A Lecture Tour
 
The story, written in first person, is about a professor of Literature who was short of money and decided to go to Drammen, to give a lecture about the novelist Alexander Kielland, one of the most famous Norwegian writers of the 19th century, to earn some extra money.
After reaching Drammen and looking for a hotel, he visited an editor and a lawyer. Both of them put him on the alert that there wasn’t much interest in literature in the city, and he probably would lose money on his business. Furthermore, the same day that he scheduled to give his lecture, an anti-spiritualist was doing his show with apes and wild animals, and it would attract a crowd.
Despite these warnings, he rented one of the pavilions, he paid for an insertion in the newspaper giving the date, place and topic of his lecture, and hired a man to hang cards with publicity around the city, advertising the event.
By chance, both the narrator and the anti-spiritualist stayed in the same hostel.
Each of them talked about what their show was like, and the anti-spiritualist asked him to work on his show because he needed a man to introduce the animals. The narrator didn’t accept it because he thought the anti-spiritualist “was afraid of the competition and was worried that he would steal his audience away from him”.
The day of the show, only the lawyer came to the lecture on literature because almost everybody was watching the show with apes and wild beasts.
When the narrator got tired of waiting for his spectators, he returned to his hostel ashamed and disappointed and aware that he didn’t have any money for the train going back home.
In the middle of that night, the anti-spiritualist, after his show was finished, came into the narrator's room and inquired him about how his lecture had gone. With a bit of embarrassment, he said that he had cancelled it. After that, the anti-spiritualist gave him details about how many problems he had with his presenter that evening and offered him once again the occupation as a presenter of the beasts.
One more time, the narrator found this offer offensive. “Never would I be a party to such vulgarity!!! A man had his honour to consider”, he thought.
The following day, the anti-spiritualist offered him some money if he looked over the speech about the beasts, correcting the grammar and brushing up the language.
It was impossible for the narrator to refuse this offer because “he was doing the man a favour really, and it was, after all, a service in the cause of literature”, and, the most important, he needed the money.
Not only he remade the speech from the beginning to the end, but also accepted to do the speech during the show.
Although the show ended up being a success and the anti-spiritualist was pleased and thanked him warmly for his support, he refused to pay him unless he accepted to appear in his show the next evening. But the narrator decided not to continue with this business and return to his city.
In our story, the protagonist believes that literature itself can bring great benefit to people's souls, and that it doesn’t matter what their real needs are. But the harsh reality shows him that his work can only be successful if it’s adapted to the tastes of the people who are going to receive it.
The citizens of Drammen work hardly during all day, and, in their free time, they only desire to entertain themselves with any activity that will help them forget about their daily routine. They don’t want to be educated.
The protagonist failed his initial approach on his literary tour and was wildly successful when he adapted to the crowd, but I'm not sure if he learned anything from this experience.
I wonder what the real usefulness of literature in our current world is, and if different types of literature are necessary, depending on the social or cultural class of the person.

QUESTIONS

Who was Alexander Kielland?

What’s the present name of Kristiania?

How did the porter guess that our protagonist was a poor man?

What other lecture was taking place at that moment in Drammen?

How can they warm the blankets?

What did our protagonist do to leave the posh hotel?

Where did he want to give his lecture?

What did the anti-spiritualist offer him at first? And what was his answer?

The literary lecture: how did it work? Why?

Why, according to the anti-spiritualist lecturer, cannot a local man present the beasts in the lecture?

Why did our protagonist accept to give the lecture about animals at the end?

This lecture was a serious exposition or only quackery? How do you know?

Was the lecture a success or a failure? How is it described in the text?

What happened with the hyena?

“That’s the power literature has to move men’s minds”. Do you think literature, or a book, or some books can change your life (remember Werther)?

How do you feel when you read something worth of reading, and you know its author is a Nazi?

 

VOCABULARY

took stock, befitting, catered, outgoings, carpetbag, touting, venue, furrier, outlay, swarming, foreboding, posh, butt, dozed off, breeding, scoffed, pelting, standing-room, badgers, marten, Jack of Clubs, mangle, houses, undertaking