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1、CYNTHIA OZICK (b. 1928) sees a clear distinction between art and life: “As for life, I dont like it. I notice no interplay of life and art. Life is that whichpressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperiallyinterrupts.” In Ozicks life there has been a long time between what Grace Paley would call “k
2、nowing and telling.” Ozick was born in New York City, the daughter of a pharmacist. She received a B.A. from New York University in 1949 and an M.A. from Ohio State University in 1950 with a thesis titled “Parable in Henry James.” She didnt publish her first work, the novel Trust, until 1966. Three
3、collections of short fiction followed: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), and Levitation (1981). In 1989 she published Metaphor and Memory: Essays and The Shawl, a novella developing the short story included here.In her essay “The Lesson of the Master” in
4、Art and Ardor (1983), Ozick described how as a young writer she was betrayed by Henry James. After college she worshiped literature, seeing herself “a priest at that altar, and that altar was all of my life.” She felt that James was trying to teach her a lesson through his fiction, that an aspiring
5、writer ought “to live immaculately, unspoiled by what we mean when we say liferelationship, family mess, distraction, exhaustion, anxiety, above all disappointment.” Ozick remembers herself as a nearsighted twenty-two-year old “infected with the commonplace intention of writing a novel” and trying t
6、o live “like the elderly bald-headed Henry James.” Years later she realized her mistake. To be a writer,one must keep ones psychological distance from the supreme artists.The true Lesson of the Master, then, is, simply, never to venerate what is complete, burnished, whole.never to worship ripe Art o
7、r the ripened artist; but instead to seek to be young while young, primitive while primitive, ungainly when ungainlyto look for crudeness and rudeness, to husband ones own stupidity or ungenius.Yet Ozick also understands that life “interrupts,” and the journey to art is beset with difficulties. In h
8、er best short fiction, such as the Holocaust story “The Shawl,” she accepts the challenge of her craft, writing in a swiftly imagistic style. She admits that “in beginning a story I know nothing at all: surely not where I am going, and hardly at all how to get there.” Some recent books are What Henr
9、y James Knew (1993), The Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996), and The Puttermesser Papers (1997).CYNTHIA OZICKThe Shawl1980Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Ma
10、gda. But she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breasts of her own, Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms. Magda took Rosas nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was
11、not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floati
12、ng angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. She looked into Magdas face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawls windings. The face
13、, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosas bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosas coat. You could think she was one of their babies.Rosa, floating, dreamed
14、of giving Magda away in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of line they might shoot. And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the w
15、oman take it? She might be surprised, or afraid; she might drop the shawl, and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die. The little round head. Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself. The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of
16、 a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble, gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosas teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, s
17、o Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawls good flavor, milk of linen.It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights. Magda did not die, she stayed alive, although very quiet. A pe
18、culiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth. She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap, and Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness. On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magdas face. “Aryan,” Stella said, in a voi
19、ce grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said “Aryan,” it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said, “Let us devour her.”But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, but she did not walk very well, partly because she
20、 was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda, Stella gave nothing; Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, but not growing much. Stella did not menstruate.
21、Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not; she learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in ones mouth. They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stellas bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so s
22、he could put her teeth into the little thighs.Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already, but she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of Rosas breasts; Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. No on
23、e took it away from her. Magda was mute. She never cried. Rosa hid her in the barracks, under the shawl, but she knew that one day someone would inform; or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her. When Magda began to walk Rosa knew that Magda was going to die very soon, someth
24、ing would happen. She was afraid to fall asleep; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magdas body; she was afraid she would smother Magda under her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less, Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air.Magda was quiet, but her eyes were horribly aliv
25、e, like blue tigers. She watched. Sometimes she laughedit seemed a laugh, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh. Still, Magda laughed at her shawl when the wind blew its corners, the bad wind with pieces of black in it, that made Stellas and Rosas eyes tear. Magdas eyes were always
26、clear and tearless. She watched like a tiger. She guarded her shawl. No one could touch it; only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed. The shawl was Magdas own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners when she wanted to be very still.Then
27、 Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die.Afterward Stella said: “I was cold.”And afterward she was always cold, always. The cold went into her heart: Rosa saw that Stellas heart was cold. Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the
28、 pencils faltered at the barracks opening, where the light began. Rosa saw and pursued. But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks, in the jolly light. It was the roll-call arena. Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks and go out and stan
29、d in the arena with Stella and hundreds of others, sometimes for hours, and Magda, deserted, was quiet under the shawl, sucking on her corner. Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosas two palms, he
30、r fingers were on fire, she was astonished, febrile: Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling. Ever since the drying up of Rosas nipples, ever since Magdas last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute. Rosa believed that something had gone w
31、rong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb. Even the laugh that came when the ash-stippled wind made a clown out of Magdas shawl was only t
32、he air-blown showing of her teeth. Even when the lice, head lice and body lice, crazed her so that she became as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion, she rubbed and scratched and kicked and bit and rolled without a whimper. But now Magdas mouth was
33、 spilling a long viscous rope of clamor.“Maaaa”It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosas nipples.“Maaaa.aaa!”Again! Magda was wavering in the perilous sunlight of the arena, scribbling on such pitiful little bent shins. Rosa saw. She saw that Magda w
34、as grieving the loss of her shawl, she saw that Magda was going to die. A tide of commands hammered in Rosas nipples: Fetch, get, bring! But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda wo
35、uld still not have the shawl; but if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back, Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again.Rosa entered the dark. It was easy to discover
36、the shawl. Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones. Rosa tore the shawl free and flewshe could fly, she was only airinto the arena. The sunheat murmured of another life, of butterflies in summer. The light was placid, mellow. On the other side of the steel fence, far away, there were gr
37、een meadows speckled with dandelions and deep-colored violets; beyond them, even farther, innocent tiger lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets. In the barracks they spoke of “flowers,” of “rain”: excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper
38、 bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosas skin. She stood for an instant at the margin of the arena. Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire: grainy sad voices.
39、 The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to u
40、nfurl it like a flag. Rosa lifted, shook, whipped, unfurled. Far off, very far, Magda leaned across her air-fed belly, reaching out with the rods of her arms. She was high up, elevated, riding someones shoulder. But the shoulder that carried Magda was not coming toward Rosa and the shawl, it was dri
41、fting away, the speck of Magda was moving more and more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder a helmet glinted. A light tapped the helmet and sparkled it into a goblet. Below the helmet a black body like a domino and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified f
42、ence. The electric voices began to chatter wildly. ”Maamaa, maaamaaa,“ they all hummed together. How far Magda was from Rosa now, across the whole square, past a dozen barracks, all the way on the other side! She was no bigger than a moth.All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of
43、Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine. And the moment Magdas feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot wh
44、ere Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence; but of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magdas body they would shoot, and if she let the wolfs screech ascending now through the ladder of
45、her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magdas shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolfs screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magdas saliva; and Rosa drank Magdas shawl until it dried.GRACE PALEY (b. 1
46、922) was born in New York City. She studied at Hunter College and New York University, and in 1942 she married for the first time. She had two children from that marriage. In the 1950s she turned from writing poetry to short fiction. Her first book of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959),
47、established her reputation as a writer with a remarkably supple gift for language. As Susan Sontag has noted, “She is that rare kind of writer, a natural with a voice like no one elsesfunny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.” When this book went out of print in 1965, its reputation survived, stre
48、ngthened by the infrequent appearances of her new stories in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, the Noble Savage, Genesis West, the New American Review, Ararat, and Fiction.During the 1960s and 1970s Paley was prominent as a nonviolent activist protesting the Vietnam War. She was secre
49、tary of the Greenwich Village Peace Center, spent time in jail for her antiwar activities, and visited Hanoi and Moscow as a member of peace delegations, defining herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” During the World Peace Congress in Moscow in 1973, she condemned the Soviet Union for silencing political dissidents; the congress disassociated itself from her statement. Paley has long been a
