Tell Me a Riddle (32 page)

Read Tell Me a Riddle Online

Authors: Tillie Olsen

Tags: #test

BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
11.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 126
Washing sweaters: Ma, I'll never forget, one of those days so nice you washed clothes outside; one of the first spring days it must have been. The bubbles just danced while you scrubbed, and we chased after, and you stopped to show us how to blow our own bubbles with green onion stalks.
Looking at the text from the background of Olsen's Omaha life suggests that family and personal experiences are the crucial ground of her fiction. Yet much of the ethnic and radical past that she remembers so vividly and emotionally in interviews is distanced or dropped in the fiction. In
Yonnondio
the ''unlimn'd" who "disappear" and fade from "the cities, farms, factories" fade within the novel whose epigram promises to recall them. As abstractions of the Depression poor, the Holbrooks lack history, community, and beliefs, all of which were integral to the way of life among packing town families. "Tell Me a Riddle" reflects the Russian past before David and Eva's immigration but does not reflect the fifty years of ongoing political commitment in her parents' lives. Like the Holbrooks, David and Eva stand for a type within a generation but just what "type" can never be clear when characters lose so much context. These characters dramatize the pathos of lives constrained by poverty, of women whose energies are depleted by child care and housework, but the rich texture of a place, a heritage, and active beliefs that have historically given substance to immigrant culture, including the Lerner family of Omaha, are largely absent.
III
Olsen's decision to create characters who represent in the abstract the experiences of many fulfills her ideological and artistic principles, but her writing is most powerful when it escapes the generic and becomes culturally specific. The brilliant clarity given David and Eva's Jewish language and the poignancy of the lost youth in Russia contrast sharply with the featureless pathos of the Holbrooks. The closer Olsen writes to autobiography, the finer her work, as the weaknesses in "Requa" may also illustrate. The autobiographical background also suggests that family life is her essential subject. Para-
 
Page 127
doxically, however, her art often silences much of the richness in her imaginative sources. If the early years appear to be a major touchstone for her imagination, her often painful recollections in the interviews suggest that Omaha is where the silencing began. In those early years Olsen learned the lessons of discrimination on the basis of class, ethnicity, and gender. Olsen remembers both the strength she found in a socialist home and the marginalization she felt as a poor Jew who was also radical, female, and literary. Her tentative place in the wider community was underscored when her decision to join the Communist Party created anger and embarrassment at home. Those ''circumstances" described in
Silences
that "blight" and damage the young woman writer match those she felt "in the vulnerable girl years" growing up in Omaha.
Silences
gives us "the barest of indications as to vulnerabilities, balks, blights; reasons for lessenings and silencings" that affect the young woman who hopes to write:
Anxieties, shamings. "Hidden injuries of class." Prevailing attitudes toward our people as "lower class," "losers," (they just didn't have it); contempt for their lives and the work they do .... the blood struggle for means: . . . . classeconomic circumstance; problems of being in the first generation of one's family to come to writing (263-64).
If these are the circumstances that silence creativity, it may also follow that the artist may wish to silence the silencers, may, indeed, have to silence them in order to write at all. When I asked about the power the past holds for her, Olsen said, "I certainly still dwell in that world in my writing."
Like Adrienne Rich's speaker, Olsen's stories "circle silently/about the wreck" amid "the evidence of damage," "back to this scene" (Rich 24). The self that speaks, the artist in the woman, must counter that which silences. The particular eloquence of Olsen's work is in her portraits of women who survive with enough intact to be themselves in a world that does not open for them. In "I Stand Here Ironing" the mother explains what she did and could not do to protect her vulnerable daughter, Emily, a sensitive and artistic child "of depression, of war, of fear." Though the past "will never total," the mother
 
Page 128
believes that in Emily ''there is still enough left to live by"
(Riddle
20-21). Perhaps this story can be seen as a metaphor for Olsen's own mothering of her artistic self, one without the "totality of self" that may exist where the past was full of love and wisdom, but one with "enough left" to build on what was strong and spoke of survival. And like the young Omaha woman who used aliases
when she did her communist work, Olsen's fiction functions like an alias, too. Names are changed and events reformed, sometimes to universalize the specific; sometimes to protect herself and her family from the scrutiny that accompanies overt autobiography; and sometimes, perhaps, to distance the anguish of being marginalized by the surrounding world. The pain of being viewed as a radical in one's own ethnic community, as a troublesome Jew at school, and as a disappointment in one's own family may well leave one haunted by the past but unable to embrace it, remembering all the places and faces, and yet unwilling to speak their names.
Notes
1. Deborah Rosenfelt's "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and Radical Tradition" examines her radical past after Olsen had moved to California.
2. Personal interview December 30, 1990. This essay is based largely on a set of interviews and correspondence that began in the fall of 1987 and continued through 1991. In addition to telephone interviews, the two longest of which occurred on February 13, 1988, and Dec. 30, 1990, Olsen provided a number of newspaper clippings, family letters, manuscript fragments, and miscellaneous documents from her past. I wish to express my gratitude to Olsen for her generosity in sharing her memories and allowing me to use these materials. An earlier sketch of the Lerner family was published locally as "Tillie Olsen's Omaha Heritage: A History Becomes Literature" in
Memories of the Jewish Midwest: Journal of the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society
(Fall 1989), 1-16.
3. Most of the criticism on autobiographical novels defines the genre from male-centered works such as
David Copperfield.
More useful to me were works on women's autobiography, especially
 
Page 129
Sidonie Smith's A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, and the essays in Shari Benstock's The Private Self and Estelle C. Jelinek's Women's Autobiography.
4. Olsen has discussed her understanding of the Bund and ''what I feel is
my
Yiddishkeit, my Jewish heritage" in the interview article by Rubin. See also Howe,
World of Our Fathers,
17.
5. Carol Gendler's M.A. thesis, "The Jews of Omaha," University of Nebraska-Omaha (1986), is the most extensive local history. See also
Our Story: Recollections of Omaha's Early Jewish Community 1885-1925,
eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Patricia O'Conner-Seger, with Carol Gendler, for personal accounts, including several of immigrants from Minsk and Odessa.
6. All six of the Lerner children were born in Nebraska and attended Omaha's Central High. The first four (Tillie was the second in order) were apparently born on the farm, the last two in Omaha, though Tillie remains uncertain exactly where and when she was born. Previously published accounts that give a specific date, usually January 14, 1913, are inaccurate, according to Olsen, who unsuccessfully researched her birth date a few years ago when she applied for a passport.
7. The City Directory lists his occupation as "painter" beginning in 1925.
8. The strike was part of a nationwide effort that ended in the breakup of the union in South Omaha. For details, see William C. Pratt, "'Union Maids' in Omaha Labor History, 1887-1945."
9. See William C. Pratt, "Socialism on the Northern Plains, 1900-1924," for a detailed account of the Party at this time.
10. Zelenka, n.p. In
Silences
Olsen calls Central High her "first College-of-Contrast" (vii).
11. Another brother, Harry, was active in the Workmen's Circle. In 1940 he was Secretary of the Omaha Workmen's Circle, Branch 690E, and wrote an editorial for the
Labor Lyceum Journal
honoring the dedication of the new Labor Lyceum. The editorial is entitled, "Shall Youth Be Away?" and urges his generation to join the Workmen's Circles and learn to appreciate what it had meant to the parents. I wish to thank Mrs. Morris Fellman of Omaha for making this booklet available to me.
12. Minnesota author Meridel Le Sueur is another case of children of well known socialist parents who joined the Communist Party in the 1920's. Both Le Sueur and "Tillie Lerner" signed
 
Page 130
the ''Call for an American Writers' Congress" in 1935. See Linda Ray Pratt, "Woman Writer in the CP," for details of Le Sueur's CP involvement.
Works Cited
Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1988.
Gendler, Carol. "The Jews of Omaha." University of Nebraska-Omaha, 1968.
Howe, Irving.
World of Our Fathers.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.
Jelinek, Estelle C., ed.
Women's Autobiography.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Olsen, Tillie.
Silences.
New York. Delacorte Press, 1978.
_____.
Tell Me a Riddle.
New York: Dell, 1961.
_____.
Yonnondio: From the Thirties.
New York: Dell, 1974.
Pratt, Linda Ray. "Tillie Olsen's Omaha Heritage: A History Becomes Literature."
Memories of the Jewish Midwest: A Journal of the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society
(Fall 1989): 1-16.
_____. "Woman Writer in the CP: The Case of Meridel Le Sueur."
Women's Studies
14 (1988): 247-64.
Pratt, William C. "Socialism on the Northern Plains, 1900-1924."
South Dakota History.
18 (Summer 1988): 1-35.
_____. "'Union Maids' in Omaha Labor History, 1887-1945." In
Perspectives: Women in Nebraska History.
Lincoln: Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska State Council for the Social Studies, 1984, 202-03.
Rich, Adrienne,
Diving into the Wreck.
New York: Norton, 1973.

Other books

Liz Ireland by Trouble in Paradise
Last Fight of the Valkyries by E.E. Isherwood
London Calling by James Craig
Deadrock by Jill Sardegna
The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts
Seducing the Accomplice by Morey, Jennifer
Picture Perfect (Butler Island) by Nikki Rittenberry
Thrown By Love by Aares, Pamela
Tempt (Ava Delaney #3) by Claire Farrell