Excerpt:
Her best known piece of writing is the 1989 short story, "The Shawl", with its furious first line: "Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell." It describes the journey of a woman and two children into the Nazi death camps. It is short, brutal, hallucinatory. She wrote it, she says, in a way she has never written anything, before or since. "I'm not a mystic, I don't believe in any of that. I've been on the side of rationalism. I had an experience, just the first five pages – I hate to say it, it's the kind of absurd thing that I mock – that I wasn't writing it, that it was dictated. Just for those five pages."
As a five-year-old in Russia, Ozick's father recalled being locked with other Jews from his community in the synagogue, which the mob gathered outside and threatened to burn. (They were rescued by a priest from a neighbouring village.) Ozick had, by contrast, an uneventful upbringing and describes herself as a "garden variety New Yorker"; it took some nerve, I should think, to have written from the point of view of Rosa in the story, who sees her baby starved and murdered, thrown up against an electric fence by a camp guard. When "The Shawl" was published a psychiatrist wrote to Ozick assuming that she was herself a survivor. She wrote back to correct him and "he wrote something very strange; he accused me of lying, said I was delusional, told me that his patients, many of them, were so rattled and destroyed by their experiences, that they too denied this event. It amazed me, simply amazed me, for someone to make such an assumption. That really brought home to me the sense of [my own] presumption."
On the other hand, she says, "All writing is presumption of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being."...
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