Books |
Tell Me A Riddle
Tillie Olsen
By
Published: Feb 26, 2009
Category:
Fiction
Her father escaped from a Russian prison and, smartly, fled to the United States. He and his wife settled in Nebraska, where he worked as farmer, packinghouse worker and paperhanger — and, in his free time, served as State Secretary of the Socialist Party.
Tillie was born in 1912, the second oldest of six children. And that is the first important thing to know about her, for in those times, if you were poor and the family was large and you were near the top of the birth order, a girl was expected to help with child care. That did not crush Tillie — she was burning to change the world. A year before graduation, she dropped out of high school to crusade for unions. "I have no regrets,” she said later. “The library was my college."
In 1931, at 18, she joined the Young Communist League. She developed incipient tuberculosis, and, during her recovery, started her first novel, Yonnondio, and became pregnant with her first daughter. At 19, she was a mother.
Soon she was married, and not rich, with four daughters. She had little time to read — or write:
Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron."
She scribbled, kept notes, but her day jobs and her commitment to her children, her marriage and her politics made writing all but impossible. What galvanized her was the bombing of Hiroshima. She read an article that described the first night without moonlight after the bombing. The sky above Hiroshima, according to the article, was illuminated by burning bodies. Tillie Olsen resolved to do what she could to avoid more holocausts. And how would she do that? “Write on the side of life."
She was 50 when she published Tell Me a Riddle, a collection of stories. It won prizes and made her name; decades later, the title story would become a powerful movie. Recognition did not help her to write faster; she’d publish one more book, tellingly named Silences, about thwarted writers.
Of the four stories in “Tell Me a Riddle”, three are unforgettable.
“I Stand Here Ironing” is the story of a mother who, at 19, had to send her infant daughter to live with the father’s family. Now the child is back. And the happy baby she remembered is not the child she now lives with:
When she came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father … thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone. She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now — the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.
The school is terrible, the teacher evil. But what could the mother do? “It was the only place there was.” She sees clearly her daughter’s future:
She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.
Writing this matter-of-fact is always bracing. That the resolution is bleak doesn’t matter. Or, maybe, it makes the story better — you get the sense you’re reading non-fiction, not some concocted tale with a manufactured conclusion.
“Hey Sailor, What Ship?” is about a man who is, literally, at sea. When his ship comes into port, he’s lost — good for nothing but alcohol and sodden visits to the only family that will take him in. On this furlough, he’s beyond pickled; he’s losing brain function. Simply: this is the best portrait I’ve ever read about late-stage alcoholism.
The title story — 52 pages, in big print — is why you must read Tillie Olsen. The characters are old immigrants, married for 47 years, and unhappy. David wants to sell the house and move into a home; Eva wants to be alone. Screaming follows, and a stand-off that will be instantly familiar to readers with aging but strong-minded parents.
This verbal tennis turns the reader into a referee — really, into one of this couple’s seven children. We come to understand that David was often out, doing political work, while Eva took care of the house and children. It’s not surprising that he wants to live among people. Nor is it unreasonable that Eva would wish to be alone, the better to read, listen to music, remember.
The memories are of love and pain. The book they showed their kids, the book about famous martyrs for justice. The time Eva bundled the kids up and walked them to the railroad station to spend the night because it was heated and they were too poor to buy coal. The clothes she made, the meals the cooked, the love she gave and gave…
If you are Jewish and of a certain age, stories like this may be familiar to you. If your parents grew up during the Depression, you also have heard what it was like to get through without money or much hope of change. And you know too how that family history both impressed you and frightened you, and how, at the end of the visit, you said a silent prayer that you would be spared such hardship.
Eva, in Olsen’s story, comes to face even worse — there’s a reason she stays in bed. But as she moves closer to death, she also moves closer to herself. And it’s in those pages that this story changes from a debate between two stubborn old people into something grander.
Is it pleasant to read Tillie Olsen? I ask: Is it pleasant that people are losing their jobs and houses? No. It’s thoroughly unpleasant, it’s tragic. But in a culture that takes the sting out of reality and concocts the news so it’s drama lite, it’s good to feel the real thing. And I can’t think of anyone who tells you her truth about life — especially about a woman’s life, back when women were nothing — better than Tillie Olsen.
To buy “Tell Me a Riddle” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the Kindle edition of “Tell Me a Riddle” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the DVD of “Tell Me a Riddle” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Silences” from Amazon.com, click here.
