Ozick's works of nonfiction—Art and Ardor, published in 1987, Metaphor and Memory, published in 1989, and Fame and Folly, published in 1996—discuss literature, Ozick's feelings about her art, and her ideas about the relationship between art and history.

Ozick's story "Rosa," published in The New Yorker in 1983, then in a short story collection paired with "The Shawl," picks up the story of Rosa and Stella some thirty years after the final scene of "The Shawl." It carries over some of the themes and images from the earlier story.

Elie Wiesel's memoir Night (1960) portrays Wiesel's own experiences as a teenager imprisoned in two concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At least one critic, Elaine Kauvar, believes there are allusions to Night in "The Shawl."

Anne Frank's The Diary of Anne Frank describes the life of a Jewish family trying to elude capture by the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II. It is written by a young Jewish girl, a girl of about the age that Stella is in "The Shawl."