I'm on an email newsgroup for women writers in the Bay Area and yesterday, there was a posting from one of the members, Ericka Lutz, announcing the death of her grandmother Tillie Olsen at age 94 in Oakland. Here's what Ericka wrote:
Dear Friends,
Dear Friends,
My grandmother, Tillie Olsen, passed away last night, January 1, at 11:40 p.m. The end was peaceful -- my mother, father, and my Aunt Kathie were there with her. Other family members had attended to her round-the-clock in her final weeks. My Grandma will be deeply mourned both publicly and privately by the many people she touched with her words, her deeds, her ideas, her humor, her intelligence, her dramatics, her kisses, her love of life and humanity, her belief in justice, and her fierce blue eyes and loving hands. She is, and will be, deeply mourned by me. With love,Ericka
I emailed condolences to Ericka and it was odd to think of myself as one step removed from Tillie's actual granddaughter. Even though I never had the privilege of meeting her, she was an inspirational grandmother figure for me, for many women, I imagine. Jewish, feminist, social and labor activist, writer of short stories and essays, mother. So much of her writing grappled with the conflicting pulls of art and motherhood, of finding a way of giving of her words and giving of herself in the most basic sense, as diaper changer, cook and breadwinner.
I emailed condolences to Ericka and it was odd to think of myself as one step removed from Tillie's actual granddaughter. Even though I never had the privilege of meeting her, she was an inspirational grandmother figure for me, for many women, I imagine. Jewish, feminist, social and labor activist, writer of short stories and essays, mother. So much of her writing grappled with the conflicting pulls of art and motherhood, of finding a way of giving of her words and giving of herself in the most basic sense, as diaper changer, cook and breadwinner.
For me, her most memorable short story begins, "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." What a line. I wish I wrote that. I no longer keep a lot of books in the house. A long time ago, I got tired of carting them from move to move, so every year I go through and sell even my favorites to the second-hand store. But tonight, when I looked at my bookcase, there was the worn cover of a hardback of "Tell Me a Riddle," the survivor of many cullings.
Tillie's output as a writer was meager, but only in the physical sense. A collection of short stories, essays. That's because she was also busy raising four daughters, working as a waitress, being a wife, a hotel maid, a factory worker, a grandmother, joining the Young Communist League and organizing packinghouse workers in Kansas and Nebraska.
* Here's what the obit in the New York Times said about Tillie: In 1933, she moved to San Francisco, where she would live for more than 70 years, and resumed her pro-labor activities. During the 1934 San Francisco general strike, she was arrested, and promptly chronicled the strike in The New Republic and The Partisan Review.
* Here's what the Santa Cruz Sentinel said: Politically active, class conscious and joined to the world as if every soul were a soul mate, Olsen countered the literary myths of her male peers. She immortalized the woman who stayed home, carried an emotional burden and held things together for her family.
* Here's what Tillie said about herself in an interview: Well, I'm going to be one of those unhappy people who dies with the sense of what never got written, or never got finished.
I hope I can do my small share as writer, mother, advocate and soul mate to the world by moving every day towards that ever-moving finish line that inspired and motivated this amazing woman.
For more on Tillie -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen
Ericka edits Literary Mama, a literary magaine for the "maternally inclined." www.literarymama.com/
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