Cynthia Ozick's novella The Shawl is one of the strongest Holocaust narratives I know of. I find it more affecting than Primo Levi's Survival In Auschwitz and in the same league as Elie Wiesel's Night. What makes this feat amazing is that, while she is up with the very best literature on the Holocaust, she was never interred like Levi and Weisel were.
The Shawl is a masterstroke of magical realism. A young Jewish girl in a concentration camp gives birth to a skeletal infant. So long at it is in the shawl it stays quiet, and sucks milk from the shawl in order to nourish it. At several points it is questionable whether the baby exists or is a figment of the narrator's fractured mind.
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