Yonnondio Word from: Alieza

I just finished reading Tillie Olsen's book Yonnondio: From the Thirties. It is an impressionistic description of the working class (and specifically women) in the 20's and the impossibility of breaking out of the cycle of poverty. Depressing but surprisingly beautiful. The main character is a child though whose eyes the world is poetic and unbearable at the same time.

The book itself has been reconstructed. Tillie Olsen began writing it when she was 19. But because of the stresses of the working class, she only published the first chapter as a short story. Even when she was given the chance to finish it (a publishing house offered her a stipend to work on it), the responsibilities of motherhood prevented her. In the 1970's she pieced the manuscript back together. I think her choice not to rewrite it, or even finish it is an act of performative language; the book, as published, adds a dimension to her content: as the plot testifies to the horrors of poverty and the additional pain of women, her inability to finish it as a young adult is a testimony to those problems.

Why write about this book here on Mimaamakim? Tillie Olsen's father was Jewish and she considers herself a Jewish atheist and a Socialist who sprung from Jewish messianic utopianism. She said about her feminism, "What is Yiddish in me . . . is inextricable from what is woman in me, from woman who is mother." Perhaps as a Jewish woman she has a sensitivity for minorities and victims.

I was specifically interested in one moment in the book. The mother envisions her grandmothers Shabbat table- a white table cloth, candles, loaves of bread and wine- but no direct mention of Shabbat. I thought it was so interesting that a writer who seems to have made her Jewishness the fight to reveal the universal plight of all would mention anything Jewish at all. Later writings of Olsen make her animosity towards traditional religion quite clear. But in this book, this unfinished manuscript that she wrote when she was just 19, a little beauty of Jewish ritual slipped in. I'm still not sure what to make of it.

As I said in an earlier post- Gershon Shaked suggests that to be a Jewish writer is to be in a constant struggle with our Jewish identities.