A Tribute to Tillie Olsen Dedicated to Joanne Trautmann Banks

Abstract

A Tribute to Tillie Olsen Dedicated to Joanne Trautmann Banks Anne Hudson Jones (bio) Tillie Lerner Olsen was the second of six children born to Samuel and Ida Lerner, Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States. Born on a tenant farm in Nebraska, she was a worthy heir of her parent’s revolutionary heritage. In 1929, she left high school after the eleventh grade to begin working at a variety of low-paying jobs—hotel maid, packinghouse worker, linen checker, waitress, laundry worker, and secretary—in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and California. She became an activist, a member of the Young Communist League, a labor organizer, and a prisoner after she was jailed for participating in the San Francisco general strike in 1934. She also became a wife, marrying Jack Olsen in the 1930s, and the mother of four daughters, Karla, Julie, Kathie, and Laura. Against the odds, she also became a writer. Although Olsen began writing Yonnondio: From the Thirties in the 1930s, the work was not published until 1974. “I Stand Here Ironing,” her first short story, was not published until 1955, when Olsen was forty-three years old. Tell Me a Riddle, her best-known collection of stories, was published in 1962, and Silences appeared in 1978. In Silences, a work of nonfiction, she writes of the forces that silence women, people of color, and the working poor and keep their voices from being heard in our literature. In her story “Tell Me a Riddle,” which won the O. Henry Award for Best American Short Story of 1961, it is the voice of the elderly woman patient, Eva, that is silenced. Olsen’s extraordinary talent and advocacy were eventually recognized, and she received many honors from such institutions as Stanford University (the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the [End Page 281] Humanities, the City of San Francisco (Tillie Olsen Day in 1981) and the City of Santa Cruz (Tillie Olsen Day in 1998).1 I dedicate this memorial tribute to Tillie Olsen to Joanne Trautmann Banks, who died just four months after Olsen did, because the two women are forever linked in my mind through the article titled “Death Labors,” which Banks wrote for volume nine of Literature and Medicine in 1990.2 For that volume, a number of important works of literature and medicine had been selected by the issue editors, who then invited both a literary scholar and a physician to respond to each work, or set of works. In her piece, Banks was charged with writing about both Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle.” (Julia E. Connelly was the physician respondent to these same works.3) Banks’s basic thesis is that the two dying protagonists—Ivan Ilych and Eva, respectively—must break down the old forms of their earlier lives in exploration of their true identities as they answer the challenge of cancer and prepare for their deaths. Her more complex thesis is that in preparing for their deaths, the characters must repudiate the literary styles in which their own lives have been written, as the very different styles of Tolstoy and Olsen represent the very different ways in which Ivan and Eva have lived. “Forced to move to the rhythms of others” rather than her own,4 Eva has been so long silenced by the poverty and hard work required to rear her several children that Olsen presents her in fragments and elliptical utterances rather than in the well-formed linear sentences that Tolstoy uses to recount Ivan Ilych’s life. Olsen’s style for Eva is a woman’s style, capturing all the everyday interruptions of family duties that often prevent women from sustained intellectual work or writing. Olsen’s style in this story is difficult for some readers to follow, just as Eva’s style has become difficult for her family to understand. As she is dying, Eva’s death labor becomes the recalling of the revolutionary ideals of her youth in Russia, ideals that had originally grounded the love...