SOURCE: Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Languages of Memory: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, pp. 313-26. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Wirth-Nesher examines how fiction acts as collective memory and the specific instance in The Shawl of the fictional account of a Holocaust survivor's remembrance.

There is One God, and the Muses are not Jewish but Greek.

—Cynthia Ozick

Since the coming forth from Egypt five millenia ago, mine is the first generation to think and speak and write wholly in English.

—Cynthia Ozick

The first of Cynthia Ozick's epigraphic assertions concerns the relationship between Judaism and artistic representation; the second concerns the means of representation and of communication within Jewish civilization. The first concerns what Jews may say; the second, how they say it. It is clear in the first...