SOURCE: Gordon, Andrew. “Cynthia Ozick's ‘The Shawl’ and the Transitional Object.” Literature and Psychology 40, nos. 1 and 2 (1994): 1-9.

In the following essay, Gordon examines the shawl as a transitional object, as defined by D.W. Winnicott, and as the focus of the conflict in “The Shawl.”

Cynthia Ozick's “The Shawl” (1980) is a Holocaust story about a mother struggling heroically but in vain to save her baby in a death camp. Brief and poetically compressed—two thousand words, just two pages in its original publication in The New Yorker—it has a shattering impact. Ozick manages to avoid the common pitfalls of Holocaust fiction: on the one hand, she does not sentimentalize, but on the other, she does not numb the reader with a succession of horrifying events.¹ She works largely through metaphor, “indirection and concentration” (Lowin 107). For example, the words “Jew,” “Nazi,” “concentration camp,” or even “war” are never...