Tell Me a Riddle     by Tillie Olsen Original language: English Published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Pub. Date: 1977 Format: Paperback, 116 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.32 x 8.02 x 5.28 ISBN: 0385290101 List Price: $13.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.16

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This collection of four short stories from the 1950s shows the enormous versatility of Tillie Olsen as a writer, her sensitivity to idiom, and her passionate involvement with the living language of those whose worlds she depicts. Whether in the jangled conversations of sea-dog Whitey with his old friends in Hey sailor, what ship?, or the mounting euphoria of a black gospel meeting in O Yes (’The music leaps and prowls. Ladders of screaming. The voices in great humming waves...’) or the terse words of Eva, embittered by a life of drudgery (’Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?’) in Tell me a riddle — whatever themes Olsen treats, the language is rich and powerful, bearing the still warm imprint of the worlds it comes from.

These worlds are the worlds of America during the Depression, tales of poverty and the reproduction of poverty across the generations, of the slow entrenchment of racial divides, of age and social neglect, and above all these are tales of the impassioned but thwarted and impoverished lives of cleaners, shoppers, cooks, workers, mothers and wives: women. In I stand here ironing, a mother contemplates the string of constraints and necessities which have brought distance between herself and her eldest child, a gifted young girl with an already cold and windswept heart. The young mother had to work by day, then by night, the child was taken into care, no welfare, no daddy (who left fed up of ’sharing want’); and the child’s reserve at school, ’dark and thin and foreign-looking’ in an age enthralled by chubby blondes. The mother muses on the impossibility of calculating the damage, but notes that a life is there which goes on as best as it can (’so all that is in her will not bloom...but in how many does it?’), with its hopeless constraints but with its robustness too.

The emotionally most intricate story is the title novella, Tell me a riddle, about the bursting apart of an old woman’s world, a world shared with her husband for forty-seven years. She has laboured, toiled, she has humiliated and denied herself over her working life to secure food and clothing for her husband and children, isolated by enforced domesticity and with no time for a social life or for reading. When her working life is over, the weight of these burdens erupts into the present, not so much in bitterness as in a determined pursuit of what now she desires, the last possible opportunity to have the life which could be hers...

This couple though are destined to remain in exile, immigrants from Russia, torn from their Jewish roots (’Tell them to write: Race; human, Religion; none’), alienated from their all-American grandchildren (’Commercial’s on; any Coke left?’) and bred — ironically enough in the context — on revolutionary ideals of progress ’with flame of freedom in their souls/and light of knowledge in their eyes’, which could never be exercised because of isolation, hunger and hard work, even to the ’hard work of dying’. Even before Eva falls ill, her question is already trenchant: ’Where is my home?’.

This could all be most miserable. What is very special about this writing, though, is that the characters, however socially marginalised, are given a tenacious individuality by Olsen. They remain resolutely in their own worlds, both mentally and verbally, fiercely thinking and fiercely feeling, mature, survivors.

’Outside in the garden, growing things to nurture. Birds to be kept out of the pear tree, and when the pears are heavy and ripe, the old fury of work, for all must be canned, nothing wasted... And her one social duty (for she will not go to luncheons or meetings) the boxes of old clothes left with her, as with a life-practised eye for finding what is still wearable within the worn (again the magnifying glass superimposed on the heavy glasses) she scans and sorts — this rag for rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending abroad.

Being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others, as life had forced her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one by one; then deafening, half-blinding — and at last, presenting her solitude.

And in it she had won to a reconciled peace.’ p79-80