Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles

Epilogue

Epilogue On 17 February 2007, at the First Congregational Church of Oakland, family and friends held a memorial service called a “Celebration of the Life of Tillie Olsen.”Mike Margolis called the community together by blowing on a conch shell; Karla Lutz and Tillie’s caregivers danced and sang an Amharic welcome chant in honor of Tillie. Annie Hershey showed clips from her retitled film Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Motion. Julie, Kathie, and Laurie gave moving tributes to their mother. Ronnie Gilbert, a member of the Weavers, sang “Bread & Roses,” Melanie de More sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” grandson Jesse Olsen Margolis played his “Song for Tillie.” Other friends and close family members celebrated her life and work. The community sang together. During this beautiful tribute, hundreds of people wept. Certainly I did. On 11 September, the Feminist Press held another memorial, this one in New York City. Laurie and Karla came east for the occasion. Laurie delighted the audience with the talk she had given in Oakland. Bad weather had prevented Florence Howe from making the Oakland celebration so she presented her remarks in New York. Women writers, including Marilyn French, Edith Konecky, and Jane Lazarre, spoke of Tillie’s influence through her fiction and friendship. At the MLA meeting in Chicago at the end of December, two sessions were devoted to Tillie Olsen. One offered an advance viewing of Ann Hershey’s film, which shows mostly the adored and adorable Tillie. The other was to be an assessment of Tillie’s life and work. At that session, I argued that we honor Tillie’s legacy by understanding facts rather than perpetuating falsities. I began by listing erroneous but accepted tales about her life: that the Lerners lived in south Omaha where her father worked in the meat-packing houses, that she was kept out of school until age nine because she was thought retarded, that she dropped out of high school to support her family. I had intended to offer instances from her entire life, but before I could proceed further, I was told that my time was up. 337 338 tillie olsen Because other speakers had taken much more time, cutting me off seemed an attempt to censor me by those who want to canonize Tillie. However heartfelt were my tears at the Oakland celebration, I have never adored Tillie. I wept then for an ideal evoked by powerful words and music. I suppose I also wept realizing that my discoveries about this larger-thanlife woman would diminish her idealized public image. I feared too that my discoveries might tarnish the progressive causes in which I also believe. My biographer’s obligation, however, is to try to tell the truth as artfully as possible and not to let love hamper honesty. I think that true love accepts the complete person, but adoration does not. My more than ten years working on this book have been filled with exasperation and excitement, fury and fascination, tedium and love, but not adoration. Early in Two Lives, Janet Malcolm makes a case for Gertrude Stein as the writer “whose work most cries out for the assistance of biography in its interpretation.” Because the public images of Tillie Olsen are such products of her times, I believe that her life cries out even more for this objective biography, with its mixed verdict on Tillie Lerner Olsen and with, I hope, most riddles solved. I expected writing this biography would be fun. Alice Walker said it would be rich. My forays into history as far back as czarist Russia and as far east as mainland China, into times poignantly mixed with pain and hope, have been deeply enriching for me. I hope my readers will find this book enriching for them as well. ...