children. Olsen says that ''the story is fiction, but it is rooted in the real." The names of popular musicians date the story from her children's youth, but the memories of the Black church come from Olsen's own girlhood. In the story the white child is shocked at the intensity of the emotion in the Black church. "That sound and the church" in Olsen's mind were Calvary Baptist Church, located in Omaha at 25th and Hamilton Streets between 1901-1923, where she sometimes went to hear the music on summer nights. She used this material as the recitation in Alva's mind in the story. The Black church, she remembers, was "a certain kind of community where you could let things out."
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Olsen has repeatedly stated that Eva and David in "Tell Me a Riddle" are not specifically her parents, but the history of Sam and Ida Lerner, socialists from Russia in 1905, parents of six children, active in the union, selling their house and retiring to a Workmen's Circle home, suggests how deeply rooted this story is in the lives of her parents. Many other Russian Jews of their generation came to the United States after the 1905 Revolution, but numerous details specific to her family fit the fictional characters. David and Eva have been married forty-seven years, and in 1956 when Olsen's mother died, her parents, who apparently had been united in Nebraska sometime between 1908 and 1910, had been together approximately forty-seven years. David and Eva have six living children, as did the Lerners. Like Sam Lerner, David was "an official" who had helped organize and run the Workmen's Circles. At one point when David is trying to convince Eva to sell the house, he tells her about the reading circles in the retirement home, and she says, "And forty years ago when the children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go?," an apparent reference to the Workman's Circle. Some of Eva's words are Olsen's mother's, as we have seen in the essay written by Ida. Olsen told me that the episode in Yonnondio in which Anna takes time from her laundry to teach her children how to blow bubbles with a green onion is based on a memory of her mother. This memory reappears in "Tell Me a Riddle" when Vivi recalls how Eva, also while washing clothes, taught her how to blow bubbles:
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