TELL ME A RIDDLE
by Tillie Olsen, 1961

In 1980 Lee Grant directed a feature film version of Tillie Olsen's story "Tell Me a Riddle." Although it received generally favorable reviews, the film failed financially. Its failure is easily explained. As a reviewer in Variety observed in December 1980, "Tell Me a Riddle" is "a very morose story about very old people and thus a challenge to today's commercial market." Less explicable is Grant's initial decision to film Olsen's work, a story essentially without plot, action, or typically heroic characters. And yet one sympathizes with Grant's desire to bring Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle," the title story of her 1961 collection, to a moviegoing audience, for it is a story that makes its readers feel the pain, anguish, and joy of common, everyday life.

Married for 47 years, David and Eva find themselves riven by a quarrel. The quarrel ostensibly focuses on their immediate future. David would like to sell their house and retire to Haven, a facility of his lodge, where he might dispense with "the troubling of responsibility, the fretting with money" and engage in "happy communal life." She, having spent her years intensely engaged in the communal life of seven children and a husband, looks forward to the peacefulness of her nearly empty home, to the solitude of moving to her own rhythms. The disagreement between husband and wife goes beyond the question of where to spend their next years, however. The dispute is over how they are to live these years, not materially but philosophically. What are David and Eva to live for?

As the story proceeds, we learn that before marriage and children David and Eva were politically active in a Russia undergoing change and revolution. "Hunger; secret meetings; human rights; spies; betrayals; prison; escape"—such were the components of their lives in Olshana. The 16-year-old Eva rebelled against her father's objections and learned to read. Her teacher, a Tolstoian, impressed Eva with the holiness of life and of knowledge, and teacher and student spent a year imprisoned in Siberia. After this year Eva and David escaped to the West and to the United States, the land of opportunity. Their middle years were spent trying to realize this opportunity: how to put bread on the table, or how to make a soup of meat bones begged from the butcher. Most often, there was no time left for anything beyond the daily demands of the body—no time for reading, for developing the mind and the soul, or for touching the sacred in individual human life.

But now deaf and half blind, Eva insists on taking advantage of a new opportunity. She has retained scraps of melodies from her idealistic youth, memorized phrases from revolutionary readings, and, most importantly, kept her belief in a progressive humankind. She now wants to live differently, to return to those early songs. David, however, seems to have lost touch with the songs and instead is caught up in the babble of America.

The two argue over the course they are going to chart, and in the process of doing so Eva loses her health. An initial diagnosis of a kidney disorder leads to further tests, surgery ("the cancer was everywhere"), and the realization that Eva at best has a year to live. The children agree that Eva must not be told and that David must act as though she is recuperating. This act propels David and Eva on yet another westward journey, from Connecticut to Ohio to California, to visit children and grandchildren. The journey, which is parallel in direction to that from Olshana to the United States, raises questions again about the meaning of human life. For what does one live? What might one teach to and learn from others? In order to ask and answer these questions, Eva must protect herself against maternal springs of emotion, holding her newest grandchild away from her and escaping from her daughter Vivi's memories by crouching in the children's closet. It is in California that Eva comes close to answers. She approaches life's "transport," its "older power," as she skips in the ocean, picks up sand, and looks "toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness the millions of years ago." But like the United States and like Russia, California is a contradiction, providing both revivifying sea air and the horrors of smog ("She walked with hands pushing the heavy air as if to open it, whispered: who has done this?"). Eva's sense of the contradiction that life offers both beauties and horrors grows as she becomes sicker. Her fear that humankind will destroy itself increases, as does her sense of hope and her iteration of idealistic lines from Victor Hugo.

Eva dies, but before doing so she carries her message of despair and hope to her granddaughter Jeannie and, more importantly, to David. As he listens to her babbling, a sense of bereavement and betrayal overwhelms him, and he mourns not just for what he is losing but also for what he has lost. For a moment he counters the loss with the thought of his American grandchildren, "whose childhoods were childish, who had never hungered," who would be "nobility" to those in Olshana. But then, in the voice of Eva, he asks himself, "And are there no other children in the world?"

Such is the plot of "Tell Me a Riddle." As in a play by Chekhov, one of Eva's favorite authors, little happens. Time passes, and a character dies. No one performs any particularly large or heroic action. Instead, we get wisps of conversations, threads of thought, and a hodgepodge of hope and regret. But as in a Chekhov play, we also attain a sense of the characters as human beings like ourselves, growing older and often losing touch with "that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and being moved." Eva, a wife of 47 years and a mother of seven children, conveys not only to David but also to us her belief in that certainty.

—Madonne M. Miner