Writing the history of the world, God crossed the boundaries of non-fiction. He forms each day like an allegorical play. Sacraments are obvious props, but like in any well-crafted piece of literature, every circumstance is also a trope. Water drenches us in holiness, via metaphor, each time we turn on the sink; like the prophet Jonah (Matt. 12:39), every person is a sign. The Creator took no care to distinguish between the figurative and actuality; reality is confusing.
Cynthia Ozick wrote such a baffling world into being. “The Shawl” is fictional but carries the grit of actuality; it is practical, but weighted with symbolism. The protagonist Rosa offends the reader with her refusal to accept a post-Holocaust life; “to call it life is a lie,”[1] she says. Rosa only deliberately participates in reality through her enjoyment when she writes a letter to her dead daughter or feels the beloved shawl. Rosa has a life, one that gnaws the reader until he appreciates it.
Rosa is a delegate of the people who scuttle down the streets lost in apathy, people who, involuntarily, cry out to be told of salvation and significance. Artistic media is fixated on the self-obsessed subject to the exclusion of those that are indifferent, but Ozick remembers them. Here is life in front of you: like Augustine and Ozick, take it and read – and share it with the illiterate.
[1] Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 58.
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