Tell Me a Riddle Read Free Page A

Helen's comes to shore on leave and collapses of alcoholism and ill-

 

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ness in their home before disappearing once again; the very intrusiveness of his visit measures the degree of loss the story records, the loss of an earlier time when men and womenincluding Lennie and Whitey, the sailorunited to struggle as progressive union activists for better working conditions and for a better world. In ''O Yes" Helen sadly watches her daughter grow increasingly estranged from her closest friend, who is Black, as the formal and informal tracking system of the American public school system intrudes on the less racially differentiated world of early childhood.
The most sustained and complex of the pieces in the Riddle volume, "Tell Me a Riddle" addresses some of the deepest concerns of western culture: the nature of human bonding; the quest for, in Olsen's words, "coherence, transport, meaning"; the aspiration toward justice; the confrontation with death. The ethical and spiritual dimensions of these themes cannot be severed from the social and historical. Like Olsen's other work, the novella celebrates the endurance of human love and of the passion for justice, in spite of the pain inflicted and the capacities wasted by poverty, racism, and a patriarchal social order, and in spite of the horrors of the Holocaust and the war and the new possibilities for nuclear destruction. Its power derives from a distillation of such themes in evocative and precise language that makes poetic and performative use of the specific rhythms and idioms of Yiddishborn English, and from a structure that only gradually reveals the relevance to the lives of one poor aging immigrant Jewish couple of a past embracing the great struggles and great horrors of modern history. In its slow unfolding of that past and in its final revelation of Eva's passionate idealism, the novella invites its readers to recognize how deeply they are embedded in the processes of history, to meditate on the "circumstances" of class, race, and gender as the soil which nurtures or impedes human achievement; and to acknowledge, as David does, the discrepancy between what isincluding perhaps their own complicity with injusticeand what should be.
"Tell Me a Riddle" begins with an argument between an old man and woman, married forty-seven years, a deadly battle of wills over whether or not to sell their home and move to a cooperative run by his lodge. The conflict is shaped by the

 

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different ways poverty has affected the man and the woman. David longs to be free from responsibility and fretting about money, so that he can use ''the vitality still in him"; Eva, remembering the desperation and humiliation of years of making do with remade clothes and begged meat bones, vows to "let him wrack his head for how they would live," for she "would not exchange her solitude for anything." "Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others" is a refrain echoing through the text. David longs to be surrounded by friends; Eva longs only to be left alone. The years of struggle to keep her family fed and clothed have transformed her capacity for engagement in the lives of others into its obverse: the terrible need for solitude, for "reconciled peace."
When Eva falls ill, and the illness turns out to be terminal cancer, David finds himself compelled to become a caretaker himself. Concealing the seriousness of Eva's condition from her, but fearing to stay home alone with her in her dying, he takes her on a pilgrimage, first to visit a daughter and her family in Ohio, and then to Venice, California, which in those years was home to a community of older, working-class Jews. As her condition deteriorates, Eva becomes delirious, pouring out fragments of poetry and song from her youth. Tended in her illness not only by David but by her granddaughter, Jeannie, a nurse, Eva passes on to Jeannie the legacy of her earlier years. It is crucial to the way "Riddle" works as art that Olsen