The Shawl

The Agony
In The Shawl, there are no direct descriptions of how Nazi slaughtered Jewish people, but all the same I can sense the persecution they had suffered, not only physical sufferings such as hunger, miserable living condition, and death, but also mental agony such as the deep sorrow when a mother watched the death of her baby while she could do nothing about it. It seems to me that every word in this story is saturated with tear and blood, and these suffering Jewish people, including the little infant, give out loud but soundless cries which shake my nerves.
Cynthia Ozick uses various devices of language to make us feel the agonies of those Jewish people persecuted by Nazi. These agonies came from their tortured body as well as their tortured and twisted heart.
¡°Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell.¡± (Paragraph 1, Line 5) There are repetitions of ¡°cold¡±. Stella is the main reason which cause the death of Magda, because she took away the shawl, the very thing th...