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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 107
vested'')and comprehensions, lines, paragraphs in other work accomplished the years since.
Little remains of the makings of what came to publication. Here are samplings of the scraps and pages that remain of the loosenings, the wellings just as they came, the practicing of freedom which perhaps made the facility possible; the rounding out and completion of a thought, a story kernel, a notingwhere before could only be one word, a scrawl of line, in thieved minutesto leave some deposit, to affirm that there still lived in me a writer being.
1955-56. Profound earthquake years, presage yearsfor me, for my country, for our world (therefore also for me). Forty-three years old then, born in 1912 or 1913, I had lived through such periods before, but only now had I time to try to comprehend them, record their impress as they occurred, even try to shape into literature. As I tried in "Oh Yes", "Tell Me a Riddle."
1955-56: Year of writing resurrection for meyet year of arterial closeness to death and dyings of four of the human beings ineradicably dearest to me: my mother, my father-inlaw Avrum, Seevya, and Genya (whose last days of dying are inscribed in "Tell Me a Riddle"). All four of that great vanishing generation whose vision, legacy of beliefin one human race, in infinite human potentiality which never yet had had circumstances to blossom, in the ever-recurring movement of humanity against what degrades and maimsI tried to embed in that novella.
Year for me of overwhelming realizationdeath-occasionedof the vulnerability and transcience and dearness of life. World year of escalating nuclear threatand seeming defeat for the petition movement of millions the earth over to totally disarm; only Picasso's peace dove, created as symbol for us, seemingly remaining.
1955-56: Presage year indeed for our country. Year that began still in the McCarthyite shadow of fear; of pervasive cynical belief that actions with others against wrong were personally suspect, would only end in more grievous wrong; year of proclamation that the young were a "silent generation," future "organization men."
 
Page 108
Caught in the press of family obligations and without the money to buy books, Olsen got into the practice of copying quotations from library books onto 3 x 5 cards. These, she explains, ''I could carry with me for available moments to re-read, ponder, or learn by heart. Yes they have come stained over the years, dog-eared, torntacked (as still they sometimes are) over sink or stove during tasks, or over my work desk, or still habitually pulled out to re-read while on the bus or waiting somewhere."
In addition to transcribing quotations from canonical authors, Olsen also carefully compiles "evidence of the . . . way language
(Caption continued on next page)
 
Page 109
Year of the Supreme Court decision against segregation ''which generates feelings of inferiority"; of Rosa Parks, Birmingham, Little Rock. Year of the first happenings of the freedom movements against wrong which were to convulse and mark our nation and involve numberless individual lives.
So was burgeoned "O Yes" ("Baptism"). So was begun "Tell Me A Riddle." (Both sourced in the years before as well.)
Other wellsprings fed:
I was again migrating from one world into anotherand in more than the twice-a-week commute to Stanford. It had been so with me, unarticulated, in my youthhood when I crossed the tracks to Omaha's academic high school. It was so now with me, as it was happening in my children's lives. I was freshly experiencing, re-experiencing that terrible agony, harm, of having to live in a class/sex/race separating circumscribed time, when those among whom we are born, live, work, those with whom we are most deeply bonded, cannot journey along with us into that other world of books, of more enabling circumstances for use, development of innate capacities.
I was living more and more, too, in the world of written language (some of it consummately used) (though the sound of written language, spoken aloud in class, read to Hannah, my own words spoken to myself while writing, was coming often into my ears).
For years, for nearly a lifetime, in love, in wonder, in envy, I had noted, kept evidence of the
other
consummate way language is, has been, used: the older, more universal oral/ aural-by "ordinary" human beings denied the written form.
(continued from previous page)
is, has been used" by America's different cultural groups. Her sensitivity to different modes of speech is evident here on a large blue sheet that records the distinctive words and syntax of black San Francisco diction. This material, gathered together from years of jottings, is integral to the story "O Yes," which is set in a black Baptist church and reflects Olsen's special interest in strains of American English which for racial and class reasons are often excluded from the written medium. Her respect for the integrity of diverse ethnic voices signals the democracy of Olsen's art, which celebrates diversity within its unifying vision of human community. (Exhibition Notes)
 
Page 110
On scraps, in notes, in memory-and now, in my Stanford time, typed up, garnered together: remarkable phrasings, expressions, song lines, wisdoms, characterizations heard, spoken, sometimes sung, by unwritten, unwriting others in my life.
I had circumstanced time. I had profoundest need-to encompass, make tangible, visible (I hoped indelible) all the above. So did ''O Yes" come to be. So was begun, and one-third finished, "Tell Me a Riddle."
Then-had to return back to that uncircumstanced world of what silences.
 
Page 111
Critical Essays
 
Page 113
LINDA RAY PRATT
The Circumstances
of Silence:
Literary Representation
and Tillie Olsen's
Omaha Past
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
ADRIENNE RICH,
"Diving into the Wreck"
Tillie Olsen's
Silences
addresses "the relationship of circumstancesincluding class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is bornto the creation of literature" (xi). Olsen's primary concern is with those conditions that stop women from writing, but implicit in her pursuit of "unnatural silences" is the question of how situations affect
what
one writes. Like Virginia Woolf, Olsen is aware of how difficult it is for a woman to achieve a "totality of self" that can escape such circumstances as "anxieties, shamings," "the leeching of belief," indeed, all the "punitive difference in circumstances, in history" that damage and inhibit the capacity to write
From
The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen
, ed. Kay Hoyle Nelson and Nancy Huse (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 229-243.
 
Page 114
(Silences
263, 27). Olsen candidly discusses those things that affected her opportunity to write, but
Silences
does not explore the relationship between her circumstances and what she did write. Many readers presume a connection exists between her fiction and her life, and Olsen has acknowledged that her stories may be in some sense ''profoundly autobiographical" and that as a writer she dwells in the past. Most of the story of Olsen's past in the radical Jewish community of Omaha, Nebraska, has not been published before.
1
In a series of interviews about her Omaha years, Olsen recalled her early life and the use she has made of it in the fiction.
2
These accounts illuminate the autobiographical representation in the work, but also significant is what she does not use. Many of the ideological and ethnic circumstances which influenced the young Tillie Lerner are themselves silenced in the literary form.
Olsen's long residency in San Francisco and the general absence of a defined place in much of her work obscure the particulars of her heritage. Readers who know her through "I Stand Here Ironing" are often unaware of the author's Jewish background, and she rejects being categorized as a Jewish writer. Only the couple in "Tell Me a Riddle" are Jewish, and she has said many times that they represent a type and not her particular parents. Few readers associate her with Nebraska and fewer still with the Russian Jewish and socialist community in Omaha. Tillie Lerner grew up in the immigrant working class that settled in north Omaha, a neighborhood once populated by many Jewish businesses and now the center of the city's Black community. The stories in
Tell Me a Riddle
(1961) and her novel of Depression life,
Yonnondio
(1974), draw heavily on her family's life in Omaha but usually without the specifics of a setting or ethnic culture. The Holbrooks in
Yonnondio
are abstractions of the Depression's working-class poor, and the Jewish couple in "Tell Me a Riddle" live in an unnamed city. Yet Olsen grew up in a distinct kind of midwestern Jewish community where "the times, climate into which one is born" composed the often harsh "circumstances" of poverty, bias, and marginalization.
Olsen's belief that the valorizing of the individual self is patriarchal and central to the ethics of capitalism influences her rejection of a self-oriented autobiographical form. Her po-
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