Tell Me a Riddle (30 page)

Read Tell Me a Riddle Online

Authors: Tillie Olsen

Tags: #test

BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
8.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 115
litical belief in one international community of human beings limits the emphasis she is willing to put on ethnic and regional identities. In addition to the conscious role ideologies of politics, gender, and selfhood play in determining form, her responses to the painful nature of her past may also create the need for fictional abstractions and silences. In my interviews with Olsen she frequently returned to two themes: the richness of her radical past in a family of active socialists, and the pain and embarrassment that went with being poor and different, even within one's own ethnic group. The Lerner family story is, in retrospect, representative of a certain kind of Jewish leftwing life among immigrants to the United States. Olsen recognizes her family as a significant type of their generation, but when she was living that life, she often felt a sense of rebellion and alienation. Yet, the intensity of these years makes it her most important subject.
Discussing the autobiographical content of Olsen's work is difficult for her because not writing autobiographically is ''what I'm all about" as an author who believes in "one human race without religion." "Should a writer write autobiography is a modern question," she says, noting that earlier authors were not scrutinized for the elements of their life in every piece of fiction they wrote. Yet, she characterizes her story "I Stand Here Ironing" as "close to autobiography," "O Yes" as "profound autobiography," and "Tell Me a Riddle" as "very, very autobiographical." "Autobiography takes many forms," Olsen comments, and explains that often the autobiographical elements in her stories are "probably deeper things" than the details of experiences and places. Her novel
Yonnondio
has some close parallels with her family's history, but she "was not writing an autobiographical novel" when she composed it. "I was not writing an immigrant saga," Olsen has commented in response to questions about the lack of ethnic or religious identity attributed to the novel's fictional Holbrook family. The novel was not "entirely different," however, and "a large part of it was what was in the neighborhood." Two questions I hope to examine are 1) what is the autobiographical experience out of which the author builds this fictional world? and 2) what does it mean for the literature that much of that experience is silenced in the fictional representation?
3
 
Page 116
I
Midwestern urban Jewish communities such as the one in Omaha were smaller than their East Coast counterparts and increasingly remote from involvement with radical politics and the labor movement. The socialist beliefs which many Eastern European Jews such as Olsen's parents brought to the Great Plains were perhaps more susceptible to the pressure of acculturation and assimilation in an environment such as Omaha where a tradition of conservative politics, agrarian economics, and a largely homogeneous white Western European population dominated. Though many other Omaha Jews share the same Russian socialist background, the Omaha Jewish community developed westward out of the urban center of the city and into the suburban middle class. This migration out of the urban neighborhoods and up the economic ladder was already underway in the late 1920s when Tillie Lerner was a student at Omaha's Central High.
Working-class socialists such as the Lerners were separated by ideology from the mainstream of the local Jewish community. Socialist Jews often had different economic attitudes and did not participate in the religious life around the synagogues. Radical Jews often rejected religion, and Olsen has described her father as ''incorruptibly atheist to the last day of his life" (Rubin 3). Within a Jewish community already smaller and more isolated than those in large urban centers, Olsen's place was further marginalized when she broke with her family's socialism to become a communist. Olsen tried not to embarrass her family with her communism, and she sometimes used aliases in her political work. In school she was aware of painful class differences compounded by being Jewish, working class, immigrant, poor, and female. Tillie Lerner's Omaha background of estrangement and alienation was a painful contradiction to her family's dream of an international society in which the comradeship of humanity transcended the divisions of race, ethnicity, and religion.
Olsen's parents came to the United States at a time when efforts were underway to relocate Jewish immigrants outside the urban areas of the East Coast. Samuel and Ida Lerner had met in Russia but did not begin their family until
 
Page 117
they settled on a farm near Mead, Nebraska. Samuel was from Odessa; Ida from Minsk. The family memory is that they had first met in Minsk where Samuel had gone to work for the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement organized in Russia in 1897 and devoted to secular Yiddish culture and internationalism.
4
After the failure of the 1905 Revolution in which they had participated, they fled Russian prisons and met again in New York. After working at least through 1907 with the Socialist Party in New York, Samuel made his way to Omaha where other socialist Jews from Minsk and Odessa had already settled.
5
The family history before 1918 is unclear. For a time the Lerners were tenant farmers in the Mead, Nebraska, area, but Olsen reports that at least one year was spent in Colorado where her father worked in the mines
.6
Olsen remembers that in Mead the children were harassed on their way to school because her father opposed the war and wouldn't buy bonds.
Yonnondio
draws on memories of the farm and mining years. The novel begins in a mining community in Wyoming, but the family moves on to South Dakota where they fail at farming and from there to a packing house city like Omaha. Unlike Anna in the novel, Olsen's mother spoke little English and was isolated in the rural community. The farm years were ''terrible for my mother," Olsen said. Her father "loved being on the land," but her mother "had a hunger for a larger life" and desired to leave it. After the move to Omaha Ida Lerner studied English in one of the many night classes that schools such as Kellom Elementary ran for immigrants. Some passages from an exercise her mother wrote in 1924 as part of her English class assignment suggest Ida's own sense of social values, maternal responsibility, and literary bent. The essay, dated December 10, 1924, and addressed to "Dear Teacher" reads in part:
I am glad to study with ardor but the children wont let me, they go to bed late so it makes me tired, and I cant do my lessons. It is after ten o'clock my head dont work it likes to have rest. But I am in a sad mood I am sitting in the warm house and feel painfull that winter claps in to my heart. I see the old destroyed houses of the people from the old country. I
 
Page 118
hear the wind blow through them with the disgusting cry why the poor creatures ignore him, dont protest against him, that souless wind dont no, that they are helples have no material to repair the houses and no clothes to cover up their bodies, and so the sharp wind echo cry falls on the window, and the windows original sing with silver-ball tears seeing all the poor shivering creatures dressed in rags with frozen fingers and feverish hungry eyes.
Ida Lerner closes this essay with sentiments that begin, ''So as a human being who carries responsibility for action I think as a duty to the community we shall try to understand each other." The character of Eva in "Tell Me a Riddle" echoes many of these sentiments, and she also shares the same sense of opportunities curtailed by the burdens of childcare. Olsen used a phrase from her mother's essay in "Tell Me a Riddle" where Eva's fragmented ruminations include the words,
"As a human being responsibility."
The family probably moved to Omaha no later than 1917. Olsen believes that they initially settled in South Omaha, the meat packing area of the city, but the first record of their Omaha residence is at 2512 Caldwell, the family's permanent home in North Omaha (Omaha
City Directory,
1918). North Omaha was the section where Omaha's Jews clustered in the first two decades of the century. South Omaha, the center of the meat packing industry, was directly connected by 24th Street to the North Omaha area where the Lerners lived. Both areas were populated by ethnic and minority groups that migrated to the city to work in packing. Though not themselves in meat packing, the Lerners lived among packing house workers in a period of intense labor unrest in the industry.
In 1918 Samuel Lerner's occupation was listed in the City Directory as peddler. In 1920-23 Olsen's father worked at the Silver Star Confectionery at 1604 North 24th Street, one of many small Jewish businesses in the area at that time. Olsen's memory of shelling almonds for the candies her father made appears in some discarded pages of the
Yonnondio
manuscript where it became Mazie's experience. An unpublished fragment of the manuscript reads as follows:
 
Page 119
And then Mazie had a ''job" for two weeks. Annamae told her about it, for just shelling almonds two blocks away she could get a quarter a day. Bitterly Anna ordered Mazie not to think about it, but then thought of Monday and the insurance man, and the 60¢ made her say yes. It wont hurt the kid, Jim had insisted. So Mazie sat at a high table in a top room filled with steam from the boiling nuts and the oil, her hands in hot water, peeling the almonds. Snap, snap, her fingers seemed independent of her body, red little animals snapping at brown skin.
After the confectionery failed, Sam Lerner worked as a painter and paper hanger.
7
As socialist Jews, the Lerners built their lives around political circles instead of the synagogue. Sam was active in his union, and both Sam and Ida were active in Workmen's Circles, a national Jewish socialist organization with several chapters in Omaha. The Lerners were founding members of the Omaha Workmen's Circle, Branch 626, in 1920, and also helped found branches in Sioux City, Lincoln, and Des Moines. The Workmen's Circles served as political, social, and cultural centers for Jews whose socialist views and lack of traditional religious beliefs placed them outside the religious community. The Circles provided such traditional services of fraternal organizations as insurance policies, burial benefits, and retirement homes.
As part of the Workmen's Circles the Lerners helped to build Omaha's first Labor Lyceum at 22nd and Clark Streets. After the original labor lyceum was sold for public housing in the 1930s, Olsen's parents helped to build a new Labor Lyceum in 1940 at 31st and Cuming Street. No longer encompassed by small children, Ida Lerner was apparently active in this period, and some Omaha Jews recall her participation in Workmen's Circle activities. Both Sam and Ida spoke at the dedication ceremonies of the new Labor Lyceum which became the center for the district conferences of the Workmen's Circle. Sam Lerner was a president of the Midwest District Committee.
The family's socialist activities were often in support of the labor struggles in the packing houses. Olsen recalls the

Other books

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
Flirtinis with Flappers by Marianne Mancusi
The Hunt Club by Bret Lott
The Ajax Protocol-7 by Alex Lukeman
Lights Out by Jason Starr
Raw Exposure by Aliyah Burke
The Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke