“Witness Through the Imagination”: Gendered Perceptions of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in Cynthia Ozick’s the Shawl

Abstract While Holocaust historiography and literary criticism have typically been male-centred, on the presumption that the experiences of women and men were essentially identical, the aim of this study is to investigate gendered perceptions and representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Cynthia Ozick’s two-part fictional narrative The Shawl. The narrative focuses on the gender-based suffering of women and the murder of their innocent children and includes a brief account of a mother’s witnessing of her daughter’s electrocution in a concentration camp. The second part of the narrative represents an extended exposition of that atrocity’s psychological toll on the mother’s postwar life and her sense of being suspended in a liminal space between life and death, plagued by the constant intrusion of the Holocaust into her life.