On Place Writing And Identity Construction In Cynthia Ozick’s Short Story Collection The Shawl

The contemporary American Jewish female writer Cynthia Ozick(1928-)published the short story collection The Shawl in 1989.With the combination of imagination and history,Ozick tells the horrible experience that a Polish Jew Rosa suffered from in Concentration Camp and her assimilation dilemma after immigrating to the United States.Rosa was born in Warsaw and then adjourned to Concentration Camp,and she eventually immigrated to the United States.The three places respectively correspond to her Polish identity through misrecognition,imposed identity of Homo Sacer,and assimilated American Jewish identity.By creative place writing,Ozick vividly shows Rosa‘s identity shifts,reveals the isomorphic relationship between place and identity,and represents her concerns about the history and destiny of American Jewish people.By virtue of place theory in humanistic geography,Lacan‘s concept of ideal ego,Agamben‘s idea of Homo Sacer and Hall‘s theory of identity,the research systematically studies the change of living places and identity evolution of Rosa,the protagonist in The Shawl.Chinese American humanistic geographer Tuan Yi-Fu believed that the place is the root of all experience and the anchor point of identity.In The Shawl,Rosa respectively lived in three different places: Warsaw,Concentration Camp and the United States.These places gave her distinctive senses of place,which exerted impacts on her identity construction and deconstruction in different periods.Her place attachment to Warsaw and her desire to become an upper-class Polish were two sides of the same coin.Her unspeakable fear of Concentration Camp was derived from her imposed identity of Homo Sacer.And her escape from Brooklyn reflected that she could not accept the inferior refugee status and hoped to become a normal person like other American citizens.Finally,Rosa tried to integrate into the American Jewish community and construct a dual identity of American Jewish people.At that moment,she generated a particular sense of belonging to Miami,where she lived.Ozick‘s unique place writing not only has great aesthetic values,but also reconstructs Holocaust collective memory of contemporary American Jewish people,strengthening the foundation of American Jewish community to a certain extent.