By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Shawl’ is the best-known and most widely studied short story by the American writer Cynthia Ozick (born 1928). Published in 1980, ‘The Shawl’ is about a Jewish mother and her infant daughter and niece, living in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. The story contains some very harrowing imagery and is noteworthy for its surrealism, or even magic realism, which Ozick uses to explore the darkest time in twentieth-century European history.