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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 120
impact of the packing house strike of 1921-22 on her family, especially her father.
8
By the 1920's the Socialist Party in the midwest had lost most of the members it had before World War I, but Olsen's father continued to be active.
9
He was secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party and in 1928 was the party's candidate for lieutenant governor of the state. Family life was centered around party activities. On Sundays the children attended the socialist Sunday School and sang of the worker's struggles from the
Socialist Sunday School Song Book.
Their house was a stopping point for prominent socialists, Wobblies, and others on the Left who were traveling through Omaha.
Olsen's memories of her high school years are a mixture of the pleasures of discovering literature and the pain of recognizing her own marginalization. She had both teachers whom she credits with ''saving" her and teachers that taught her painful lessons in class differences. Despite her socialist home, Olsen has said that she "didn't really learn about class until I 'crossed the tracks' to Central High School."
10
At Central, the best high school in the state, the curriculum was "college prep" and some of the students were from prominent and wealthy families in Omaha. As children of working-class Jewish immigrants, the Lerners were, she says, "aliens in that school." Olsen remembers the striking contrasts in dress and ways, and that most students carried clean pocket handkerchiefs while the Lerner children had to make do with clean rags. "There were those things that were class differences that I had never encountered first hand," she recalls.
Olsen singled out two teachers who had a strong influence on herSara Vore Taylor who taught English and Autumn Davies who taught Civics. Taylor introduced her to Coleridge, De Quincey, and Sir Thomas Browne. "I still have her old stylebook," Olsen says. Taylor was also interested in recent poetry and urged students to go hear Carl Sandburg when he was in Omaha. Davies was "interested in my mind" and wanted Olsen to go to college. Despite occasional trouble with a few teachers because she would not silence her unorthodox and questioning mind, Tillie was praised for the humor column "Central Squeaks" which she wrote in the high school paper under the name "Tillie the Toiler." After the 1934 publication of "The Iron Throat" in
Partisan Review,
the Central
 
Page 121
High
Register
published an article on her literary success just six years after graduation. The paper notes that the column ''Squeaks" "as run by Tillie was entirely natural and unhampered by rule." The article also noted her recent arrest "at the home of Communist friends" in California and that she was awaiting trial.
Although some of her teachers encouraged her mind, Olsen also recalls the anti-Semitism of others. The difficulty of her position as a Jew was perhaps compounded by also being part of a known radical family and by her own occasionally disruptive classroom behavior. A letter to her in 1934 from her brother Gene gives us an insight into the anti-Semitic climate she found at school. The occasion of the letter from Gene was her arrest in California. At the time of the incident she was receiving her first serious attention as a writer after the publication of "The Iron Throat." Gene's letter expresses his concern that her arrest might make the Omaha papers and give the "anti-semites" a "chance to say 'see what happens to the revolutionary Jew."' He urges her to think what it would mean to succeed as a writer and imagines a moment of vindication: "It would be the greatest happiness of my life to go to [name of teacher] and throw the book on her desk and say 'look what the revolutionary Jew has done now."' These sentiments strongly suggest the discrimination the Lerner children felt in school and the desire to prove themselves worthy of their heritage.
11
It also suggests the pressure to vindicate her family through her success as a writer, a need that may enter into Olsen's hesitation in publishing and her silencing of details that would reveal her family to be a major subject.
Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle" mirrors the Russian Jewish political and intellectual values that Olsen learned at home. "There has been a real eclipsing of the beliefs of Jews of this generation," she has observed, but they were people who saw their lives as committed to the liberation of an international human community. Some members of the Omaha Jewish community characterized the Russian socialist Jews as "a kind of intelligentsia," but as the community changed, those Jews who remained socialist and communist were less influential and less visible to the broader community.
Olsen broke with the family's socialism when she
 
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joined the Young Communist League in 1931, a decision her parents could not approve. Although her parents were not happy with her decision, she says her decision to join the YCL ''was not a rebellion against my home. My decision to join the YCL was rooted absolutely out of the beliefs in our house." Her break with her parents' views paralleled in many ways the splits taking place in the Socialist Party during the early days of the American Communist Party.1
2
The decline of the Socialist Party after World War I may have contributed to the younger generation's interest in communism. From the early 1920s communists and communist laborites had groups in Omaha, and some former socialists had aligned themselves with them (W. Pratt, "Socialism on the Northern Plains" 2729). Tillie's case was not unlike that of others whose parents had been socialists in the 1900-1919 period but the children grew up to be communists in the 1924-1939 period. Despite the unhappiness of her family at her decision, Olsen recalls her father saying to her mother, "Well, she didn't join the capitalist class." "My mother would have said, 'Never join the floggers against the flogged.' She always taught us that."
Because her family, well known as socialists in the community, disapproved of her communist affiliation, Olsen sometimes used aliases in her political work. The front page story of the Feb. 6, 1932
Omaha Bee-News
features photographs of a "peaceful and small" crowd of about 100 members of the Omaha Council of the Unemployed marching to present their demands to Acting Mayor Arthur Westergard. Tillie Olsen identified herself as the woman speaker in one of the pictures under the name of "Theta Larimore, 2023 Burt Street," who is quoted as "shouting" "What becomes of the women who lose their jobs? Save their respectability." In 1934 when she was arrested in California she apparently used the name "Teresa Landale." After joining the YCL she worked in packing houses and factories in Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri. In Kansas City she was arrested for leafleting and jailed for five months. After she was released she returned to Omaha to recover her health, but by late 1932 Tillie Lerner left Omaha, first to Faribault, Minnesota, where she began writing
Yonnondio,
and then to California where she lives today.
The Lerner family history in Omaha ends in the late
 
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1940s except for one sister who lived in Omaha until the 1980s. In the housing shortage after World War II Sam and Ida Lerner sold their home on Caldwell Street and moved to the Washington, D.C., area where Tillie's brother Harry lives. Tillie's mother died in January 1956, and her father died in a Workmen's Circle retirement home in Media, Pennsylvania, in February 1974.
II
The details of Olsen's family life and the identifying of incidents and characters that appear in her fiction give us an insight to how the work is autobiographical. Two points stand out: the extensive degree to which the work draws on family experience, and the centrality of the early period of her life to her fictional imagination.
Yonnondio
sets a pattern that reappears throughout much of her work. Here the plot recasts experiences of her own family, the mother and child characters reflecting memories of her mother and herself, but the family as a whole is generalized to represent a type. Olsen commented that she identified with Mazie but that Mazie was ''not a reader" and Tillie was. Mazie was also not "freaky in the same sense that I was freaky." Mazie's response to the evening star and her school were the kinds of "deeper things" about the character that were autobiographical. Olsen's comment suggests that specific traits of Mazie were different but that Mazie's emotional responses are the "deeper" autobiographical part. Yet specific personal experiences and persons from her youth also appear in the novel. Mr. Caldwell, the farmer in the novel who wants to give the child some books, was, according to Olsen, mainly based on Dr. Alfred Jefferson, one of several socialists the family knew. Jefferson was a physician who "loved talking to my mother and was good to me. He was interested that we read." The character of Jeff, "the little Negro boy" who hears a humming in his head "that would blend into music"
(Yonnondio
91), was based on Jeff Crawford, the son of Suris and Mattie Crawford, the Black family who were neighbors to the Lerners on Caldwell Street, and whose daughter, Joe Eva, was Tillie's close girlhood friend. According to the
City Directory,
Suris Crawford worked as a
 
Page 124
butcher at Armours. The story ''O Yes" in
Tell Me a Riddle
also reflects the friendship between the two families.
Olsen's memory of the city in
Yonnondio
is that she merged details from Omaha, Kansas City, and St. Joseph, all places where she worked briefly in meat packing. The details of the city, unnamed in the novel except that the father says the family may "go to Omahaget on at the slaughterhouse," closely parallel the geography of South Omaha. Like the unnamed city in the novel, Omaha lies just west of the Missouri River on a series of bluffs with the packing plants in a shallow valley. The viaduct in the novel which the workers cross going to the packinghouse is like the Q Street viaduct which connects the ethnic neighborhoods on the bluffs to the packing houses and stock yards in the valley. The Armours plant is described in the novel as "way down, like a hog, a great hulk of a building wallowed. ARMOURS gray letters shrieked" (85). Photographs of the Omaha area from the 1930s and 1940s show a massive packing house in the center of the district with "Armours" spelled in large letters across the wall. In
Yonnondio
"the children can lie on their bellies near the edge of the cliff and watch the trains and freights, the glittering railroad tracks, the broken bottles dumped below, the rubbish moving on the littered belly of the river" (61-62). The bluffs on the eastern edge of Omaha overlook the river, and a railroad track runs beside the river. Though the old meat packing district in Kansas City also was near the river, the placement of bluffs, factories, and streets in the novel all fit the topography of Omaha. Olsen's fictional intent seems to be that the Holbrooks and the city where they live function generically, but the mass of detail in the family history and the setting suggests that the fictional representation is also specific. The fictionalizing obliterates the ethnic, regional, and political details that would locate the story in a more defined historical context.
The story "O Yes" also draws on Olsen's childhood friendship with the Black child next door, but here she combines it with similar incidents in the lives of her own children. The story tells of two twelve-year-old girls, one white and one Black, whose friendship dissolves when they reach the age at which race and class consciousness begin to divide school
 
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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."
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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