“In the madness of despair lies the sanity of hope…,” says Cythia Ozick, an American Jewish novelist and essayist. This one sentence is enough to ruminate over till eternity. The landscape of Ozick’s mind is painted by some strokes of fresh paint and some impressions that form themselves on the canvas. And meandering through them in her talk on her book, “The Shawl”, one finds an eclectic mix of the real world working in the background of the imaginary. And that does not come as a surprise when one looks at the many influences on her life and mind…she read fairy stories because, “The fairy books were very important, they had a kind of strangeness to them, a kind of unknown bleakness…C.S. Lewis speaks of the Norse tales giving him this strange unknown feeling of yearning for something…the fairy books did this too…you wanted something…” As she grew up a book that remained by her side was the famous “Little Woman…”. Later it was “Jane Eyre” who could reproduce the same sense of displacement, longing and belonging that fairy tales inspired. “Reading is life…marks on paper that translate into meaning and engages the imagination and the inner moral force that we are equipped with at birth…”
Prose goes along with verse and Ozick says, “Poems teach you about feeling, as you grow into your teens and the world develops some coherence, that’s when you begin to feel…” Reading poetry brought her a, “…feeling of tears behind my eyes all the time…to live without poetry is to live incomplete...If your motive is anything beyond writing, if it is any kind of search for power, if you think you are going to get something worldly out of it, then there will be a kind of corrupting worm at the heart of your sentences. It will only count if it does not have its audience in mind, there is no moment of decision, it is who I am and it is inevitable and it has no choice. It has always been choiceless for me…”
An author to whom the Jewish experience in the period of the war became central, says, “… it was the happiest time of my life…it was years of war…war very much on our minds…but I was happy because everything was a literary life and everything was expanding…I am roughly the same age as Anne Frank…I am bewildered by my happiness and what I think about the chimneys in Europe at that time. An entire civilisation was destroyed, an entire way of life was annihilated… the European Jewish civilisation is completely killed in the mouths of the speakers...the synagogue that has been built on top of the ashes has no worshippers…I am here now because I was not there then. Why was I not there then…my grandparents decided to become immigrants and came here…”
The core of her writing was awakened also through literature. When she read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” “…one line…a baby being thrown against the electrified fence in a death camp stayed with me for years and it turned into The Shawl. It is a book about world regret…where world regret and personal regret come together. Rosa, the heroine, had hidden her baby against her body under a shawl in a forced march…(my readers) associated with a prayer shawl that is used in Jewish prayer…I never made a decision to write, I simply sat down to write…I did not fuss and agonise and fiddle with sentence….the book is about the difficulty of forgetting, this profound deep seated grief is what makes Rosa move through the world in the way she does. We see her later in Miami as a broken woman…she is aware her child has been murdered but she wants to retain the picture of what her child might have become through the physical remnant...the shawl...referred to as a magic shawl because it can bring Magda back to life…
It restores to the idea of Anne Frank...what would have become of her literary genius? We don’t know…the second part is an ordinary story…It is also the story of Stella who has made a new life for herself in America having gone exactly what Rosa has gone through…but I think it is Magda’s book…child who was born and was snuffed out.”
Ozick adds, “…the madness of Rosa is her sanity. The responsibility of that story lies on us. If the world of the shawl has a mythological resonance (though we should always remember it was real)…the message utterly universal would be that hope can be extinguished and yet insanity preserves and revives hope… The mad woman that is Rosa knows the world has betrayed her but she has a vision of the harmonious world the proper world, the good world, the kind world. Perhaps in the madness of despair lies the sanity of hope, the way world ought to be, the good world.”
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Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDzfn76sQUU
