Since the publication in 1966 of her novel, Trust, Cynthia Ozick has carved a niche for herself in the palace of American letters. She has written profoundly on the Jewish experience in America, the relationship between art and the artist, lost European authors and their, in her opinion, slightly over-praised counterparts. In her fifth collection of essays, Ozick shows the scope and range of her skill as a writer. The first piece, a remembrance of Susan Sontag, sets the tone for the book. Many pieces are written of authors who are no longer with us, or if they are still among the living, are no longer read by a wide audience—with one or two exceptions. She jumps from subjects as popular as John Updike and Sylvia Plath to figures that are relatively unknown or not spoken of today, such as Lionel Trilling, Isaac Bable and Delmore Schwartz.

“What Helen Keller Saw” tells the life story which inspired The Miracle Worker and tells the facts behind the Keller story, which, unfortunately, goes untold too frequently. This deaf, mute and blind girl learned to compose her biography for the world to read with the aid of Annie Sullivan. The fact that this young girl learned to communicate with the world at all, let alone learned to tell her story with such beauty and intelligence is a testament to that frequently mocked practice known as Special Needs Education. Ozick paints a tale that any biographer would be proud to call their own. She decries the fact that, other than from stage productions of The Miracle Worker or the film, Keller is almost completely unknown now.

The essays move smoothly from one to the next, as if you were walking from one subway train to another. In both “Young Tolstoy: An Apostle of Desire” and “Washington Square: So Many Absent Things,” Ozick dissects the early works of the great masters, Leo Tolstoy and Henry James, respectively. And this criticism of early works is not just directed at those of dead masters. Ozick looks back on her own beginnings as a novelist in “Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel.”

Another essay, “Highbrow Blues,” defends Jonathan Franzen’s comments about his novel, The Corrections (2001), being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Ozick uses Franzen’s comments as a jumping-off point to explore the decay of literary merit. She points to the 2001 publication of Philip Roth’s collection, Shop Talk, which featured interviews and exchanges with such towering literary figures as Primo Levi, Mary McCarthy, Milan Kundera and Bernard Malamud, which received little or no attention whatsoever.

“What is notable is that Shop Talk was not notable. It was born into silence. It attracted no major attention, or no attention at all—not even among the editors of intellectual journals. No one praised it, no one condemned it.”

And what is rather sad-making about this book—and Cynthia Ozick’s oeuvre in general, save one or two exceptions—is that, with that essay, Ozick predicted the response for this book, the response frequently generated with the majority of her other publications. The tragedy is that this book is witty, delightful and intelligent—it does not talk down to the reader as some essayists, brilliant though they may be, do—yet it cannot be found in bookstores just anywhere. Rather, you must hunt for it. And that is the tragedy of Cynthia Ozick—while her prose is easily accessible, her paperbacks are not.

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I first discovered Cynthia Ozick in the sales section of a Barnes and Noble. I found a copy of her story and novella, The Shawl, in the discount bin. Despite the negative connotations of ‘the discount bin’ I would like to point out that it was through the discount bin that I became acquainted with authors like Eudora Welty (through One Writer’s Beginnings), Jonathan Safron Foer (by way of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated), Michael Chabon (by picking up The Final Problem, Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and Virginia Woolf (purchasing Mrs. Dalloway). The discount bin does offer some good items to the curious reader, despite all of the flimsy novels you can find in it.

The Shawl is Ozick at her fictional best. Divided into two parts, the first, “The Shawl” tells the story of Rosa, a WWII Concentration Camp survivor, whose infant daughter, Magda, is killed by a Nazi officer when the child wanders through the camp. The tale reads as a Kafkaesque parable, cruel and disturbing.

The second part, titled “Rosa”, picks up with Rosa many years later as she lives in Florida in a cheap, squalid apartment, walking the streets during the day, in spite of the great heat, and penning letters to her niece, Stella, who also survived the Camps, and to her dead daughter. She lives a solitary life. Stella sends her small amounts of money along with letters suggesting that Rosa needs psychological help coping with the loss of her child. Other people, usually psychologists researching Holocaust survivors, occasionally send mail. One day she meets up with an old man named Persky, who tries to get her to open up. He can’t stop talking and inviting people into his life, while Rosa wants only to be alone.

Both stories are beautifully written. Both are devastating. Both won the O. Henry Award (in 1980 and 1983, respectively). “The Shawl” was also selected for inclusion by John Updike in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. These two stories are arguably her best known works. And rightly so. These two stories are original, unique and utterly heart-wrenching. Rarely in all that has been written about the Holocaust has there been contained the nightmare that reality became for the victims.

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“Even in this awkward, fumbling, stumbling way I can actually feel… my hair stand up in the back of my neck talking about it,” Ozick said in a conversation at the 92^nd Street Y in 2008. “You had asked me if I would read [“The Shawl”] and I told you it was impossible. I even find it difficult to talk about, and whether that’s because of the subject matter or because of my… my bad feeling about having written something which I made up when there are so many true stories that happened and so many survivors still among us who keep those stories going.”

The reason I decided to review The Shawl in conjunction with The Din in the Head is because I feel that The Shawl is a book which has become crucial now more than ever. This last summer, we saw pictures of the President sketched to make him look like Hitler, rampant use of Nazi imagery and symbols—and for what? Anger over health-care reform. Glenn Beck did his television program and said, “I believe that there is going to be a witch hunt in this country, possibly all over the world, for two groups. One: Jews—it happens every time. Two: Conservatives.” The use of such symbols and such talk is not just disturbing, but it is disgusting. To compare the loss in one election to the attempts to wipe out an entire people on the basis of their religious belief is degrading to every person who suffered at the hands of Anti-Semitism. To everyone who says that the health care reform we are trying to pass equals Nazism, I urge them to read this book. Give this book to everyone you know who has ever compared someone to Hitler or the Nazis. They don’t even have to read the whole book. Weighing in at seven pages, “The Shawl” will change the way that you look at the Holocaust and the world since.

Let me leave you with one last thought. Once, when Muhammad Ali was training for a fight, he famously said, “I’m gonna float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.” Ozick floats in her dense, river-like prose and carries a devastating sting which can only come from the reality of the most devastating tragedy of our time.

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