Professor Sam SpinnerGerman 59/Section 1C3/11/13Response Paper: The Shawl and Mendel’s DaughterQuote from The Shawl, page 5: “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. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not… They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella’s bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs.”Quote from Mendel’s Daughter, page 210: “Everyone was marrying in the Neu-Freiman camp. We all wanted to start a new life… ‘In 1947, I marry, too,’ Yetala said. ‘But, you know, I make a mistake. My husband is not a good man. He hits me.’” Women that had to endure the Holocaust also dealt with many more traumatic experiences after the Holocaust had ended. While most women suffered from sexual abuse during the Holocaust, these women also suffered prolonged psychological effects that had affected their personal lives with spouses, as well as with their children. The problem with these psychological effects is that they seriously impacted the way women represented their experiences from the Holocaust. These women distrusted and were scared of being judged by people who could never understand, especially men. For these women, it washard to externalize all the internal conflicts and pain they experienced during the Holocaust. The presented passage from The Shawl demonstrates the deep turmoil of Rosa. Although Rosa obviously cares about Stella and Magda, she reveals a deep inner conflict between caring for herself and for these young girls. However, Rosa can’t show this turmoil without appearing to the readers as selfish and perhaps even soulless. Ozick, however, has no problem portraying Stella as purely self-interested; but with the protagonist of the story,Rosa, Ozick wants to express a woman in the Holocaust’s problems but not make Rosa appear as if she has no morals. Moreover, Ozick struggles with representing the infertility ofwomen of the Holocaust since she has to find a way to reveal this trouble to the reader without coming off as overly vulgar. Although this is an important topic to discuss and portray, Ozick only touches on the subject lightly, simply stating, “Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate.” Ozick does not expand on the detail and psychological effect that losing one’s fertility had on women in the Holocaust. Ozick’s perspective on this topic is very reflective on the women of the time’s view on the topic, as they preferred not to talk about it and were relatively conservative about such topics. In Mendel’s Daughter, the author portrays the women in and after the Holocaust to be extremely desperate to escape their situations. The author portrays women marrying just to escape these social situations, even if they were not marrying for love. As the author recounts, “‘…We all wanted to start a new life… In 1947, I marry, too,’ Yetala said.” The author has only Yetala’s account to refer to and uses her to speak for the whole female population of the Holocaust. The challenge with this is that Yetala’s account does not cover and properly express every woman in the Holocaust’s experience with marriage after theHolocaust. Not every woman knew they had “‘[made] a mistake,’” and that “‘[their] husband[was] not a good man,’” and that “‘he hit [her].’” What the author struggles with is being ableto represent every woman’s story about their marriage, and therefore, is not able to give a full account of what women went through in their marriages after the Holocaust. The author expresses in very few words that all these women wanted was “‘to start a new life.’” However, not all women felt this way; some would have preferred to die rather than marry a man who would abuse them like they were abused during the Holocaust. The author fails to give an alternative perspective on this because he only portrayed one woman and her view on the matter. What authors writing about women of the Holocaust struggled with was not what they could say, but rather what they could not say. Authors writing about this subject had to be cautious, but faced troubles because they feel responsible for giving the readers a full account of the victims’ and survivors’ stories. At the same time, these authors are unable to give the reader a full account because some women refused to open about their experiencesbecause of the emotional and physical