cover image The Shawl

The Shawl

Cynthia Ozick. Vintage Books USA, $11 (96pp) ISBN 978-0-679-72926-6

``The Shawl'' is a brief story first published in the New Yorker in 1981; ``Rosa,'' its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. They tell a story of a woman who survived the Holocaust but who has no life in the present because her existence was stolen away from her in a past that does not end. ``A book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind,'' concluded PW . (Aug.)