Tillie Olsen

To Tillie, former president Herbert Hoover’s 1938 Berlin meeting with Hitler had proved that capitalism was in cahoots with fascism. Hitler’s 1939 awards to Henry Ford and Charles A. Lindbergh confirmed her theory.¹ Stalin’s 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler, however, shook her either-or assumptions by putting communism in cahoots with fascism. As 1940 began, Germany occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and most of Poland, Italy occupied Ethiopia and Albania, and Spain was a military dictatorship; only Britain and France were left to fight the Nazis. The United States seemed disinterested, Tillie despondent.

With the outside world at risk, she settled with Jack, Karla, and Julie in the first floor of 50 Divisadero Street, a pleasant ginger-bread-trimmed frame house. Committed to being a better mother, she read nursery rhymes and invented ditties, took her daughters to Buena Vista Park, helped Karla with spelling words, and introduced her to Little Women. After Jack left early for the docks and Karla for McKinley Elementary School in a freshly ironed dress, Tillie was left with toddler Julie and chores like hand-washing clothes, squeezing them in a “mangler,” hanging them out, ironing them, cooking meals, and cleaning house. The “house & Karla & Julie” made life a “duty, the kids. Money bungling.” Even sex, “the flesh as Jack sees it,” seemed a duty. She felt incapable “of furnishing my emotions into words” and accused herself: “you relapse to motherhood & scratches on paper.” One scratched story idea was about a preacher who was a “unit organizer” and kept party notes in the Bible, mixing up Marx and Jesus. One was about “women who kicked their husbands out of bed & into the picket line.” She imagined another about Spanish-speaking migrant workers who tell bilingual priests about abuses from their bosses, only to have the priests protect the bosses. A neighbor remembered Tillie “wouldn’t show anybody anything she wrote,” perhaps because she invented dramatic situations but not resolutions.²

Between Tillie’s twenty-eighth and Jack’s twenty-ninth birthdays, they made a February excursion into the Sierra Mountains that soothed her domestic frustrations. They encountered such lovely snow they felt like “hibernating up there,” as she wrote Rae Schochet on the first day of spring in an unusually affectionate letter. She reassured Rae about Karla, who looked “after Gazoonie,” beat Jack at Chinese checkers, and could “wheeze out recognizable tunes on the harmonica.” She was still “original at spelling,” a flaw Tillie jokingly blamed on Rae. Tillie said she was “working on a book now about your generation of foreign born women,” but her plans were “loose and feverish.”³ She recalled Faribault “that spring I was pregnant with Karla and wrote the first part of the Holbrook book, and was so sick. We had the middle bedroom, and there was even snow when we first came, and the branches of the trees outside the window were skinny and naked—You had such a quiet, deep house.” To that nostalgic note, Tillie added, at the top of page four, two questions: “Have you heard anything at all from Abe? Did I tell you I’d broken the news to Karla about her having had a daddy before Jack?”⁴

Astonished to receive a long, legible letter from Tillie, Rae replied with news of her newly bourgeois life, taking a Delphian self-improvement course, presiding over the local League of Women Voters, listening to opera on the radio, and driving a new Dodge. But “as for Abe. Not a word in all these years since that May [1937] when I last saw him in Los Angeles. Should you get any news where he is I would like his address. It seems strange that I should be writing to you and not be able to locate him. Life does funny trics to human beings some very strange and puzling.” It was indeed strange and puzzling that, two years and four months after Abe’s death, Rae had not heard of it; strange that Tillie had not mentioned him; and even stranger that Tillie asked if Rae had heard from him.⁵

Finally closing the tumultuous Abe chapter of her life, Tillie vowed to “pull myself together.” She volunteered for the ILWU’s Women’s Auxiliary and for the PTA at Karla’s school. Her work table was a muddle of books, toys, newspapers, memo pads, scribbles of favorite quotations, and abortive story ideas. Library books told the life stories of great men and of a few significant women. They offered, however, no models for a book about unknown immigrant mothers, like Ida and Rae.

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator delighted her, not only because people said she looked like the heroine, played by Paulette Goddard, or because Chaplin’s slap-stick suited her zany sense of humor, but because the film ends with a plea for all races and creeds to overturn a system that “makes men torture” and has “poisoned men’s souls.” Most Americans, however, lost the impact of Chaplin’s warning as they chortled over his hilarious, cinematically effective, satire on Hitler (as the Dictator of Tomania) and Mussolini (as Emperor of Bacteria).⁶ Chaplin’s antics encouraged Americans to think of the real dictators as buffoons, though France had now fallen to the Axis powers and Prime Minister Winston Churchill claimed to have little but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and the Royal Air Force to defend Britain against a German blitzkrieg.⁷

Vicki Lerner wrote Tillie that Ida had learned to “‘live’ in her own right.” She and Sam were founders of a new Labor Lyceum; Harry, now a lawyer, had spoken about pacifism at its dedication, but he had drawn number thirty in the draft lottery, and Ida was terrified that he would be drafted.⁸ Gene’s Washington University graduation address was read into the Congressional Record, and Senator John Thomas of Idaho had put Gene on his staff.⁹ Vicki had a boyfriend, Sonny Richards. If her list of family accomplishments served as a rebuke to Tillie, so did her suggestion that the “folks would like a grandson.”

That September, Hitler sent as many as two hundred bombers over London most nights, demolishing power stations and rail lines. After intoning his CBS broadcasts from a rooftop with “This is London,” Edward R. Murrow described in appalling detail the Nazi “blitz” of that great city. Tillie and Jack and their friends hovered around suitcase-sized radios fearing that fascism was vanquishing civilization. With former Agricultural Secretary Henry Wallace as running mate, FDR won an unprecedented third term against Republican Wendell Willkie. Relieved, Tillie now felt bypassed by “modern war & modern politics.” She vowed to resurrect herself as “a living, acting part of the world.”¹⁰

Her colitis, however, landed her in Mt. Zion Hospital late in 1940. In a last letter to Rae, she said she had just needed to escape chores and sleep “12 hrs. a day.”¹¹ She read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, about brave Spanish peasants and the Americans who fought for them.¹² She heard Edward R. Murrow describe valiant firefighters’ battle to save St. Paul’s Cathedral. Confidence, like Chaplin’s in The Great Dictator, that dictators will die, but liberty will never perish, now sounded empty.

Tillie’s time in Mt. Zion strengthened her stamina and her will. After her twenty-ninth birthday in early 1941, she cleared her desk and found off-and-on child care for Julie. She began a new activist phase from home, typing skits and a school newsletter for McKinley’s Parent Teachers Association. She supervised rehearsals, organized meetings, and applied for a job but worried, “what kind of a mother are you?”¹³

Though the United States had supplied Churchill with WWI navy destroyers and FDR spoke of America as the “great arsenal of democracy” against fascism, the United States still did not intervene. In his January address to Congress, FDR spoke of defending American freedoms of speech and religion and from want and fear. A month later, Woody Guthrie recorded “This Land is Your Land,” subtitled “God Blessed America.” John Ford’s film of The Grapes of Wrath, with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, suggested that good Americans could survive the worse of plagues, despite the villainy of such capitalists as publishing magnate Hearst, exposed in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. But publishing giant Henry Luce, in a Life magazine manifesto, defined America’s destiny as a global empire which would make the twentieth “The American Century,” a disturbing vision of hegemony.

Budd Schulberg had heard that Hollywood comrade Stanley Lawrence was assassinated in Spain, not by Franco’s forces, but by the party.¹⁴ Schulberg concluded that Communists were as evil as the capitalists he depicted in What Makes Sammy Run, who think that “going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.” Tillie’s recognized herself in What Makes Sammy Run, not as a conscienceless Communist, but as the “gal all the critics were nominating a couple of years back to write the great American novel.”¹⁵ Now her great novel was lost, but she had declared “first duty = better world.” Abandoning any thought of making her “scratches on paper” into real stories, she began protesting the high cost of living, the health risks attendant on milk and meat shortages, the burdens left to working mothers, and forces depleting children’s self-esteem. Elected president of McKinley’s PTA, she asked herself: “is that what you really want to be a club woman? Are you building politically?”¹⁶ Actually, she was. Chameleonlike, she had switched selves again, now becoming dynamo defender, not of the CP, but of women.

On 10 May, the German blitz hit such major landmarks of civilization as the British Museum and the Houses of Parliament. “March of Time” newsreels showed appalling devastation. Nevertheless, at the June American Writers Congress, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Cary McWilliams, among others, argued that the United States should cure racism at home before fighting it abroad. Then on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin. As Hitler began a march east toward Moscow and south to the Black Sea, exterminating Jews and Bolshevists along the way, the League of American Writers suddenly abandoned neutrality, as did the American left.¹⁷ Fearing the recently passed Smith Act, which outlawed subversive organizations, both the CP and the CIO established their patriotism by calling for the United States to join the Allies.

From a CP plenum in San Francisco, Jack wrote Tillie that members cheered to hear that Britain would aid the Soviet Union against Germany and that China would aid the USSR should Japan attack. A “Louise” suggested that the CP cooperate with the PTA to advance social agendas, a move that would validate Tillie’s work and put her back into the political arena.¹⁸ At a CIO Congress in Los Angeles, Tillie put on extra face cream, pulled her curls up with combs, donned a shoulder-padded suit, and became a presence.¹⁹ Now that Germany and Russia were enemies and Britain and Russia were allies, Tillie was invigorated. She parlayed PTA work into the presidency of the California CIO Ladies’ Auxiliary, membership on a new CIO War Relief Committee, and chairmanship of a board on price-rationing in case of war.

While Tillie remained at the CIO Congress, comrades Don Healey and Dorothy Ray invited Jack over for dinner and games of gin rummy.²⁰ Then Jack dined out twice with, improbably enough, Harry Lerner. Back in 1930, Ida and Sam had sent Harry to check on Tillie in Chicago. In July 1941, they encouraged him to check on Tillie in San Francisco and to bring Karla for a stay in the big house on Lafayette Avenue. Jack borrowed five dollars to share “a good French meal” at North Beach with Harry and advised him about San Francisco gifts for Ida, Sam, and Vicki. They avoided talking politics.²¹ When the Lerners telegraphed that Harry’s draft case was “suddenly coming up,” Jack quickly drove him to the “Frisco side” of the Bay Bridge. From there, Harry hitchhiked to Omaha, without seeing Tillie or bringing Karla to her grandparents.

On his return, he wrote Tillie about the Lerners’ “spacious well-kept yard, with flowers and grass greener than any in California. The house so spotless, with floors waxed, new covers on the front-room set, and the refrigerator well stocked, and Jewish bread.” These compliments to Ida’s housekeeping were a slight to Tillie’s, as was the invitation: “all this is what Karla can have, to her enduring good and remembrance.” He congratulated Tillie on having Jack for a husband. Vicki (whom he still called “Yetta”) was marrying Sonny Richards in a religious ceremony “performed at home.” Tillie was too busy in her new CIO roles to attend, so Sam wired forty dollars for Karla to come alone.

Often derelict about paying bills, Tillie and Jack and the girls moved at least twice in 1941 and ended back on Alpine Terrace.²² Having distinguished himself for fairness and toughness on the docks, Jack became ILWU business agent and education director. He sat on the ILWU draft board. He began teaching an “official union class on Historical Problems with the CIO,” trying to remake the CIO’s historical anti-war, anti-imperialist position into a pro-“people’s war” stance.

Jimmy Durante’s absurd comedy You’re in the Army Now encouraged American neutrality until, at dawn on 7 December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, virtually eliminating the American fleet. Roosevelt declared that that day would “live in infamy” and that “righteous might” would retaliate. The United States declared war on Japan. Though his troops were bogged down in mud and snow short of Moscow, Hitler declared war on the United States, which declared war on Germany and Axis Powers. Americans became almost universally prowar. Men in Jack’s union began volunteering.

Back in Omaha, the draft board rejected Harry Lerner’s plea to escape military service, but as a pacifist lawyer he enrolled in administrative quartermaster training and soon was stationed with the Army Air Force in India. Joseph Davis volunteered for the Army Medical Corps. Like Ida, Gene believed nothing justified war’s brutality. He left his senate post to work in New York for the Women’s League for Peace and Justice.²³ With her family, Tillie fervently hoped that twenty-six different but “united nations” might outlaw war and guarantee global peace, justice, and religious freedom.

After Pearl Harbor, the big three automotive industries turned to producing tanks; factories ran day and night making ships, planes, and rubber tires. While tin cans were recycled, bobbi pins, zippers, and rubber bands, along with refrigerators and cars, were unavailable. Women went on assembly lines in arms factories and “manned” jobs like driving streetcars. Families planted private “victory gardens” so big farms could feed the troops. Red meat was mostly reserved to keep up soldiers’ strength so people ate cottage cheese or processed meat products like Treet and Spam, mindful of ditties like “save your scraps to beat the Japs.” They put orange dye in cheap white oleo to make it look like butter. The government rationed gas and issued each person a book of stamps for an allotment of meat, eggs, sugar, milk, and coffee. After years of feeling too ill and frazzled to write or work effectively, Tillie was now too busy mixing PTA, CIO, and domestic responsibilities to note her thirtieth birthday on 14 January 1942.²⁴

In February, when Sam and Ida went to New York City for a Workman’s Circle convention, Gene bought Ida a green coat with a fur collar to replace her customary black garb. Afterwards, she giddily confided she was thinking of marrying Sam. Gene said that, after nearly thirty years and six children, marriage would be “the funniest comic act in history.” Still, he thought Ida might wear a wedding ring so he and Lil collaborated to buy a ring that Vicki and Sam chose.²⁵

In March, radio KYA, the ILWU’s station, interviewed Tillie and a butchers’ union officer. Without stuttering, she urged listeners to support FDR’s cost of living controls and not pay more than the controlled price of, for example, 49¢ a pound for boneless round steak. She explained that violating controls would create a black market and inflate prices; ordinary people would be unable to afford meat; their families would be malnourished; sickness would cause absenteeism at work and school.²⁶ She spent most of 1942 making speeches on topics like “emergency milk relief” and arguing that rationing should benefit soldiers but not rob civilians of health.²⁷ Though liberal Culbert Olson had lost the governorship to anticommunist Earl Warren,²⁸ Tillie remained defiant. Like Vice President Henry Wallace, she hoped cooperation would make the twentieth, not the American Century of Empire, but the “Century of the Common Man.”²⁹

When Tillie wrote her parents that she had had a health relapse, Sam invited her to recuperate in their “lovely,” too-large house. He warned her not to send the girls alone because caring for three-year-old Julie would be “tough on mother.” Tillie could pay her hospital bill with the forty dollars he had sent Karla. She took the train to Omaha and, despite Sam’s warning, left both daughters and promised that Karla would take care of Julie. Then she sped back home. In the first issue of the ILWU Dispatcher, on 18 December 1942, a gossip column called “Hot Cargo” noted: “JACK OLSEN finally got off to a well-earned vacation. It’s a honeymoon too because he and TILLIE are such busy little bees that they’ve never gotten ‘round to it before.”³⁰ Tillie was not sick after all.

The Dispatcher sent women mixed messages. Almost every issue included a photo of a sexy woman in a bathing suit, and the “Women’s Work” page printed menus, sewing patterns, and articles like “Pretty Legs? Use union hose.” It also affirmed “Sex Equality Vital to Production.” It endorsed free after-school child care so “Mama” could be “Free to Build Air Planes.” It applauded strong actresses and called female defense workers the “women behind the man behind the gun.” It printed pictures of “Rosie the Riveter” holding a rivet gun, showing her biceps, and keeping a powder puff handy.

As 1943 began, Time magazine named Joseph Stalin “Man of the Year” for 1942 for his “tough guy” refusal to succumb to Hitler. Many Americans who thought of Stalin as Satan were upset by Time’s choice and even more offended to be fighting with, not against, Stalin. Ida begged Gene to get Eleanor Roosevelt to warn FDR against Stalin.³¹

When Labor groups planned a “march inland” to recruit members along the way, vivacious Tillie led the marchers, and a comrade remarked to Jack that she was “built like a brick shithouse.” The marchers spent a night in a big warehouse in Lathrop. Titillated by bodies breathing nearby, by the risk of discovery, and the thrill of exhibitionism, Tillie sought out Jack’s body. They made love, without light and without protection.³²

After a month in Omaha, Karla and Julie took a train back to San Francisco, and Ida went to D.C. to help Jann with her family. Left alone, Sam lamented to Tillie: “You, after many years of desertion came home with lovely two grandchildren [and] did not even give me a chance to catch [?] news of life and extraordinary developments in our material and spiritual world.” Sam had his suspicions about Tillie’s “spell of sicknesses” and speculated there “must be some error in Heaven. I’ll look into it if I’ll be ever in there.” To Karla and Julie he wrote: “you have given me happiness while you were here.”

Hollywood was creating a new genre of female-reporter movies, played by stars like Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, and Katharine Hepburn.³³ Tillie followed their example and in early February joined the staff of the Labor Herald: Official California C.I.O. Newspaper. Instructing readers to “Watch Close,” she explained how price ceilings were misused to exploit the consumer. Her article on “Price Gouge Rackets” shows an articulate Tillie effectively yoking women’s issues to the war effort. She took charge of the CIO Council for Child Care. She wrote public letters supporting emergency milk supplies and a leftist woman candidate. While running a canteen at a USO center, she publicized “labor’s role in the war” to servicemen otherwise inclined to be “predominately anti-labor.” She had become a powerful publicist for her causes and herself.³⁴

At a June 1943 convention, the massive ILWU made a crucial pledge not to strike during wartime. The “Hot Cargo” column offered a personal angle: “Jack Olsen (S. F.) was right in the groove, jitterbugging ’n everything. . . . But mama Tillie made a martyr of herself by staying away from the Chinese Banquet to teach a consumer class.” Tillie also skipped the Chinese food to avoid nausea. She was pregnant. She and Jack called their expected son “little Lathrop.”

Aided by ordinary citizen’s sacrifices, the military used brilliant intelligence, inspired battle plans, massive troop deployment, and rapid arms manufacturing. After Mussolini was arrested in a bloodless revolution, Roosevelt, in his “Fireside Chat,” on 28 July 1943, proclaimed that the “angered forces of common humanity” had turned back barbarity and corruption. He assured listeners of the “first crack in the Axis” defenses. Soon Italy withdrew from the war, at least on paper.³⁵ It seemed that the pestilence’s spread might be stopped, dictators might die, and liberty might not perish after all.

That summer, Tillie sank under a wave of “physical exhaustion.” She was too “feverish” for anything except “practicals”: recipes for cooking, child-rearing, CIO and PTA organizing, and fall campaigning.³⁶ On 7 August 1943, the Office of War Information invited her to join a “Housewives Panel” to report “what women are saying” about rationing problems, price control, commodity shortages, and other civilian supply issues. Unbeknownst to the FBI, she apparently became a special War Office informant.³⁷

That fall Karla entered a handsome public school overlooking the bay; the school was named for Kate Kennedy, who had used her positions in the public school system to war against ignorance. Kennedy’s example reminded Tillie that “women’s work” could make a difference. In the Dispatcher, “Sister Tillie Olsen contributes her own prized special recipe for a Victory Special for the months ahead”:

VICTORY SPECIAL: Recipe for more meat in the pot, more milk in the ice box, more bread on the table. To make a good Congress Victory Special, the housewife first must shake well Congressmen who are putting arsenic in the home front porridge. Then add a pinch of letters, telegrams and a dash of delegations. Place in a high pressure cooker and steam thoroughly. If the first try doesn’t take, don’t get discouraged. Add more letters, wires, delegations and a dash of pepper. Most essential of all, apply even greater pressure. Prepared singly the recipe is difficult to master. It brings best results with community participation. If all attempts fail, remember that new Congressmen will be on the market again in ’44.

A decade before, Tillie would have condemned such a “recipe” as an effete liberal attempt to work within the system. Not only had the CP and the CIO become prowar, so had Tillie, as long as women’s issues were at the heart of the war effort.

Tillie’s ten-month baby did not arrive until 17 November 1943. “Little Lathrop” turned out to be, as the nurses told her, “just” a girl.³⁸ On 28 November in Sam’s reply to a birth notice he suggested that the “Mother of Three” was setting a record for a “female tribe.” He addressed the baby as “nameless” and advised that, while children give parents pain, sleepless nights, and many worries, they give grandparents “only pleasure and great joy” and “birthday worries” about presents. He counseled Tillie “we hope by now you are about fully recovered to assume your duties first of all as mother and also spare a few minutes to write us a letter we should be able to read.” The healthy baby was not “nameless” for long—she was Katherine Jo Olsen: “Katherine” for Käthe Kollwitz, Katherine Mansfield, and Kate Kennedy. She was “Jo,” at Karla’s request, for the outspoken hero of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.³⁹ Sloughing off the weight of her strong predecessors, the baby was soon just “Kathie.” Vicki sent congratulations, saying no more about their parents’ wish for a grandson. After marrying, Vicki and Sonny Richards visited her siblings in the east and then settled with the senior Lerners at 3419 Lafayette Avenue.⁴⁰ She was thrilled that Broadway producers were reading Gene’s plays.

As 1944 began, Karla won a prize for an essay answering how children can support “Our Armed Forces?” They could sell war bonds and play “games with our wounded” at hospitals and, most important, “kids can help their mothers.”⁴¹ On 7 January, a Herald headline confirmed accusations about Hearst’s fascism by saying he made a “Deal With Hitler.” By 21 January, a resilient Tillie was the on the “1944 Manpower Committee of the California CIO Council.”⁴² FBI informants considered her “extremely active in the affairs of the Communist Political Association in recruiting new members and sponsoring campaigns for Communist candidates for public office.”

That February, the Labor Herald announced that Jack Olsen would teach a course on “You and Your Union” at the California Labor School.⁴³ With students volunteering to battle tyranny (and brave soldiers regularly depicted on the silver screen), however, Jack began to feel cowardly for not volunteering.⁴⁴ He also felt left out of Tillie’s busy life. She seemed hardly to need him so he visited the U.S. Army office, renounced his deferment (as an older family man), and enlisted. Furious Tillie felt abandoned, but sensible Tillie admitted he was wise not to consult her. Because only wives got military benefits, she proposed marriage. The small ceremony was on 29 February 1944 in the Chapel of Grace, Grace Cathedral, on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. A left-leaning Episcopal canon officiated. On the wedding license of Tillie Lerner and Jack Olsen, she acknowledged Abe Goldfarb as her former husband, herself as his widow.⁴⁵

The Dispatcher and Labor Herald had long called her “Mrs. Tillie Olsen” and “Sister Tillie Olsen” and for years her father had sent letters to “Mr.& Mrs. J. Olsen” so she did not publicize the wedding. She did tell her parents about Jack’s enlistment and asked to borrow $1000 for a house and a piano. For some years, Sam had been buying, fixing, and selling old houses for profit, but the work “played to much on my nerves.” Now he worked “for 40.00 a week 10 hours a day and 6 days a week. It is hard work and I do not like the job. Am used to be a free man.” He could only help her buy the piano.

On 11 March, the ILWU honored business agent Jack Olsen for joining the ranks of some three thousand Local 6 members already inducted into the Armed Forces. The Dispatcher printed a photo in which Jack clasps Tillie tightly around her waist. While he looks rather besottedly at her alone, Tillie’s eyes cut away from him to give the cameraman a penetrating stare. At thirty-two, she was hardly faunlike; she was gorgeous. On 16 March 1944, Jack’s thirty-third birthday, “the house was swarming with people all who came to say good luck and come back Jack.” He and Tillie and the three girls made a hasty move from Alpine to an apartment over a shop at 903 Castro Street in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. Jack expediently resigned from the Communist Party. Before he went into training he and Tillie spent a last night in a cabin near San Jose.⁴⁶

By the beginning of April, Jack had joined Company D, 81st infantry for training at Camp Roberts, south of Salinas. His enlistment somehow validated Tillie to her parents. On 4 April, Sam wrote her, “my worries are over and you are forgiven.” He hoped: “now since you’ll be in a [CIO] office, may we expect letters oftener and typed if possible, easier to read.” He wrote Jack that his generation was “still dreaming” of the reforms he and Ida had fought for in 1905. With Joseph Davis a major in the medical corps stationed in England, Sam and Ida would soon have two sons-in-law on the European front and a son in India, all doing their part to vanquish the curse of fascism.

Jack’s presence had been a stabilizing and enabling influence. Now his absence was empowering. Tillie began working as Northern California director of the National CIO War Relief Committee. On 7 April, the Labor Herald printed a dashing photograph of her, with her long wavy hair piled above her face, her eyes cut to the side, and her lips closed in a provocative smile.⁴⁷ It printed a photo of Tillie offering a bearded man a choice of razors to make him a properly clean-shaven sailor. Questioning price ceilings and championing well-regulated rationing, Tillie made nutrition a front-page political issue. Complaining about taking “work home with me—deadlines to meet,” she wrote Jack she ought to begin her speech “on labor participation” like “Jimmy Durante—I will now deliver a few appropriated remarks.”⁴⁸ She enclosed “family” clippings, mostly about her.

Jack’s absence greatly eased Tillie’s financial burden. Not only was she paid for her CIO work and Labor Herald work, but her marriage certificate entitled her to funds from the Office of Dependency Benefits. Her first allotment arrived barely a week after Jack left, and she enjoyed an “orgy of paying people back.” She actually “put aside this week’s salary” to hire her first housekeeper, though she would have to borrow money to pay the utility bill because the lights had been turned off when she forgot it.⁴⁹ Tillie moved freely in more prestigious circles. She lunched with a “big shot of the State War Chest.” She dashed off outlines for improvised speeches. She sent Jack quick little “tidbits,” amusing family narratives, lively accounts of her hectic activities, and erotic love letters.

Needing to travel for the CIO Red Cross blood drive, Tillie took driving lessons, put down $100, and agreed to pay $44.89 a month for a used car she dubbed “the heap.” She opened a checking account to keep herself “on my strait jacket budget.” She became a “financial juggler,” firing one housekeeper and hiring another. Coming home to little Kathie was a delight: “darling little mugwumple is brrrrrrring out little singy noises—such a cozy sound, like a teakettle.” She had her own stationery headed: “National C.I.O War Relief Committee, Mrs. Tillie Olsen, Northern California Area Director, 150 Golden Gate Avenue.”⁵⁰ Also an air raid warden, she owned her own gas mask.

In 1937, Tillie’s vow to kill her ego had caused negligence, guilt, and despair. By 1944, she had rehabilitated herself by reclaiming her ego. In one letter she told Jack, “I want you terribly.” But she also said she needed to talk about her work before next making love: “after all it is my livelihood, my contribution to society, and my reputation.” She remained enough of a party insider to hear a speech titled “Teheran cancels Munich.” “Teheran” referred to the November 1943 meeting in Teheran, Iran, when the “Big Three”—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—planned a two-front final assault against Germany.⁵¹ The speaker told party leaders that “Teheran” really meant that the Allies would make territorial concessions to Stalin.

Tillie churned out love letters and official reports and left her home full of “dirt, noise, disorder.”⁵² She had to clean it before she hired another helper because the five-room upstairs apartment would not hold a live-in housekeeper. Shuffling “999000 other clamoring musts,” Tillie postponed a rendezvous with Jack but wrote that their “dearest little Katushikins” was “the best and patientish baby Jackie—all polkadotted with chickenpox, but so good and smily and grateful if you toss a come-to-think-of-it-you-exist look at her.” She would not get a driver’s license until 5 May, but drove anyway, “stalled her twice—once sputtering up the Castro Hill—most embarrassing.”

After reading this tally of professional obligations, domestic worries, childhood sickness, and illegal driving, Jack finagled a furlough. He hitchhiked to San Francisco, hopped on trolleys, and surprised his wife and daughters. The bigger girls were so elated they hardly let him be alone with Tillie. She was thrilled by love-making but aggravated that, after he left, she had to stay up until dawn speed-typing an overdue report.⁵³ She feared Jack “must think I am a most disarranged, disorganized, disorderly female which honest I really am not.” She made a “stern resolution” not to procrastinate writing other reports.

Jack’s cousin Pauline had married in 1940 and lost her young husband just after their baby was born. Now she turned to Tillie for a yeasty mix of casual hospitality, lively music, political arguments, and madcap jokes. One evening Tillie’s cousin Lou, one of the Omaha Braude sons who had run away from home, also appeared, and Tillie shared with them inside information that “Teheran” meant establishing classless worker states in Eastern Europe. She managed a brief rendezvous with Jack on 13 May, south of Camp Roberts, at the Paso Robles Inn, the “half-way point on Highway 101 between San Francisco & Los Angeles.” After “three speeding hours” in bed, he hitchhiked back to camp. Tillie drove up to Salinas on CIO business. Next she started for New York City on the San Francisco Overland Limited for a CIO convention. Jack regretted she was going three thousand miles away.⁵⁴ Still he wrote Karla, his “biggest girl,” to thank her for staying “without your mama and daddy” and taking care of “Katushie” while “Mama and Julie are away.” Tillie did not, however, take Julie with her, though she pretended she did.⁵⁵

On the train, Tillie assured Jack that there were only “20 days to go” before they were together again. She described Wyoming and Agnes Smedley, who “grew with such pain, and never flowered.” Speeding over the plains, she recalled running away from home alone in 1927 and with Abe in 1930.⁵⁶ From Chicago, she took a train to D.C., to join the Office of War Information’s “Housewives Panel.” She visited the old Senate Chamber and the Lincoln Memorial and then took a night train to New York, arriving at seven on the Saturday morning, 27 May. She called Gene to ask if he were a famous playwright; then she fell asleep in her tiny room in the Hotel Wellington, south of Central Park. She woke to collect a check from CIO headquarters, post a note to Jack, and prepare for dinner.

As an upcoming playwright, Gene arranged for a glamorous dinner atop a building across from Central Park. With Albert Bein and a young actress, they sat in “a windowed corner.” As the Park became a dark mystery and the city a sparkling temptation, Tillie felt “the town submissive at our feet.” Afterward, she met CIO delegates who demanded “Teheran talk (from me).” She wrote Jack that she had once tried to “crack this town” but was “rooted solid now” in, presumably, San Francisco with him, but her CIO celebrity mothered “bad ambitions” to “be somebody in this pile of rock.”

At the conference, Tillie made a rousing argument about communism’s crucial place in America’s “Big Push” toward victory. Then she and other activists traveled to the Hudson Shore Labor School, near West Park, New York. Teasing Jack about the “attractive” guys there, Tillie assured him that she was “corseted in indifference—tonight had quite a time (tho I enjoyed it) holding off some wolves.” The retreat officially ended with a “campfire picnic beside the Hudson” and antics that lasted until dawn. Tillie got back to the City in time to send Jack a postcard of the Washington Bridge with a promise that their sexual reunion on Saturday, 10 June, would dynamite the bridge cables keeping them apart. She sent Jack a contract apparently making her a spokeswoman for the CIO.

Learning to fire a bazooka was almost as traumatic for Jack as reading “that contract you sent, forced myself to. That’s all I can say about it.” Apparently trying to redirect her ambition, he went on to say how “damn proud” he was of her writing, by which he did not mean newspaper or speech writing. Tillie’s whirlwind of prominent appearances and crusades, however, had supplanted her desire to write a novel, a book on the universal mother, or even short stories. She left New York on Sunday, spent a night in Chicago,⁵⁷ met “rank and file” workers at the local ILWU office, and Monday evening “boarded my train early—hoping to sleep” before reaching Omaha, after hectic days in D.C., New York, West Park, and Chicago.

At 5:30 on Tuesday morning, 6 June, however, the porter “trumpeted it thru the car” waking everybody: “‘that Day is here—we’re giving it to ’em now—we’s started across.’” The Allies were crossing the English Channel to retake Europe from Hitler. The porter’s D-Day call roused Tillie to rush to the club car for more news. Approaching Omaha, she heard that Allied forces had diverted the Germans with fake raids. Eighteen thousand British and American parachutists had landed in Normandy, clearing the way for amphibious tanks that brought 155,000 Allied troops ashore in one day.

When Tillie got to 3419 Lafayette Avenue, probably by taxi, she found Ida alone; Sam, Vicki, and Sonny Richards were all working. At first, drama queen Tillie treated five letters from Jack as lost treasure and “like a miser I counted and recounted my gold.” Ida was not impressed: after all Jack was still in training camp, and Tillie could see him when she got home. Admonishing Tillie, Ida said, “she won’t go to a wedding unless she can be the bride or to a funeral unless she can be the corpse.” Tillie wondered if the phrasing were original with Ida, who replied, “gay avek, original, shmoriginal, alts hat been gasagt—something about how many thousands of years mankind has had to say things.”⁵⁸ Tillie disliked Omaha’s newly “opulent look,” meaning her parents’ house with its wide porch, fish scale shingles, gabled roof, and large rooms, at odds with her preferred image of Lerner poverty. When Sam got home, they heard that Germans had pinned down Americans only on Normandy’s “Omaha Beach.”

Tillie was in San Francisco by Friday when a friend, driving up Castro Street in a truck rented for a “REGISTER TO VOTE campaign,” serenaded Tillie “over a loud speaker.”⁵⁹ By Saturday, Allied forces secured the Normandy beachhead, including Omaha Beach, and were retaking France; other troops made a triumphant entry into Rome; Stalin’s forces met German troops on the Leningrad front; and Tillie spoke exuberantly to the Columbia Steel Workers local. She “didnt stutter—I made em laugh—they clapped like hell when I was thru—some stood up when I left.” Tillie joked to Jack: “maybe I’ll grow up to be a capable person someday after all.” Her speech was on 10 June, the day she had pledged to have explosive sex with Jack. He was hurt that Tillie had met the steel workers instead of him, according to her contract. He had reason to resent her being a “capable person,” talking about “placesyourwifehasbeen,” and flirting with “wolves” or “swell guys.” After he got this letter on Monday, 12 June, he showed up on Castro Street.⁶⁰ Tillie described his appearance as a “miracle.” She raised reality in comic accounts getting the story “better all the time.” Smashing the heap’s fender embellished her tale of pratfalls, though not, she claimed, of pleasure.

People’s World, the Labor Herald, and the Dispatcher accompanied news of Allied triumphs with accounts of Tillie Olsen’s. She started a summer CIO camp where children would discuss “democratic objectives of the postwar world,” “the four freedoms,” and the “races of mankind.” She placated Jack with news that Karla was going to the CIO camp, Julie to daycare, and “Katush” was smart. “Maybe its just mamma paid attention to her for two whole days but by this noon she’d learned three parlor tricks: clucking back to your clucking sounds; hissing back to your hissing; and waving bye-bye.” Jack was hardly placated by her conclusion: “Maybe she’s a Lerner after all.” Sundays at the Castro Street apartment mixed Count Basie’s, Duke Ellington’s, and Glenn Miller’s music, children’s make-believe, cheap food, and dirty dishes; debates among war-widows and a few men focused on “what to do with the German people,” “secretary-boss relationships,” the meaning of freedom, and amnesty. She wrote Jack that a 25 June was a “typical Sunday discussion—except you weren’t here.”

Meanwhile, on 22 June 1944, FDR signed the GI Bill of Rights, designed to make medical care, mortgage assistance, and educational support available to former soldiers. Not only payback for soldiers’ service, the GI Bill was social engineering—designed to prevent a postwar relapse into poverty and unemployment. At a Fourth of July party, Karla read aloud the Declaration of Independence that Tillie had sent from D.C. For Jack the Fourth of July was “an exotic special day” because he received “five V mails from New York, Washington, the train to Omaha.” Still the little free forms did not allow for much news, and Jack complained: “I don’t like V mail. Don’t like the lack of space. Don’t send me V mails Tillie—they don’t get here any faster than regular mail.”

He was due for a ten-day furlough before going overseas, and Ida wrote one of her rare letters: “Dear T if jack is moving through Omaha take the car and the children and meet him in Omaha. Love Mother. Write to Morris [Gene].” Tillie had a staff, traveled widely in northern California, and worked “13 hours/day.” One of 495 delegates to the 1944 CIO convention in Los Angeles, she wrote Jack “two days at the convention are a must for me.”⁶¹ After the convention, she met him for another “second” honeymoon, this one in a beach cabin at Santa Monica. On 6 September, they were in San Francisco for his reunion with the girls and the ILWU.

Jack’s speech to the ILWU, covered by the Dispatcher, was on labor and the war effort. The “Hot Cargo” column observed: “By the looks of Jack OLSEN, the Army’s done him good—like a couple of love birds, he and Tillie flitted off for another ‘honeymoon’ ‘fore Jack left for Alabama.”⁶² The column listed body parts for the “Body Beautiful”—naming members with the most notable head, neck, heart, hands, and so on. The list ended: TILLIE OLSEN—‘The Shoulders,’” a polite way of saying “breasts.” While they drove down to Camp Roberts after the ILWU meeting, Jack begged her to follow him to Alabama.⁶³ She was traveling so much for the California CIO’s “Xmas blood donor campaign” that she needed a higher gas allotment.⁶⁴ He left, alone, for Camp Rucker on 15 September.

Like a heroine in a boss-woman movie,⁶⁵ Tillie was confident enough to publicly confront ILWU leader Harry Bridges. “Sister Olsen” argued that the CIO should first assist returning soldiers domestically, for example, in getting maternity and infant care, before it promoted union membership. That fall the CP ran no one for president against FDR. As the “Hot Cargo” column explained, the ILWU “usta wear strike bands and carry picket cards—now we wear ROOSEVELT buttons and carry [Democratic] literature.”⁶⁶ With Harry Truman, Roosevelt won a fourth term. The Dispatcher gloated: “Stunning Rebuke to Red-Baiters.”

Tillie’s family life was squeezed in between politics, public service, letter-writing, and visitors. She and the girls entertained Jack’s brother Leon Olson and his bride Reeva Pearlstein before he shipped out to the Pacific.⁶⁷ Sometimes Whitey Gleason, a merchant marine, showed up, usually drunk. Tillie would add a plate for supper and stay up late describing her stressful life to Whitey, who would spend the night on her sofa while sobering up, take the girls out for expensive treats before his money ran out, and vanish.

In November, her prominence in the Red Cross and the CIO enabled Tillie to take her first commercial flight for a conference in New York City.⁶⁸ Knowing Jack’s company would stop in New York on its way abroad, she told the “Hot Cargo” columnist that she was meeting him and told him to write her in care of Lillian Davis, the Bronx. She implored him not to insist that she “stay young and beautiful.” After all she was “almost 32—a 26 inch waist, that’s true, but no baby face—but I’ll stay yours Jackie.”⁶⁹ When Tillie arrived in the blustery cold city, she heard a “magnificent speech” but observed “poisonous gossip & climbing & clawing,” incompatible with the CIO’s “inspired & inspiring front.” She was so conspicuous and “young and beautiful” she had her “picture taken half a dozen times.” She was so caught up in the politics and the excitement of being photographed in her new hat and smart business suit that she did not call her sister.⁷⁰

Meanwhile, Jack and his company did indeed arrive in New York, and he did call Lillian, who insisted he come to meet Ida and Sam, who were planning to retire to a farm that Lillian and Joe Davis were buying near Poughkeepsie, New York. Sam had not met Jack, and Ida had seen him briefly in 1939. Both were grateful that he had provided a stable home for Tillie and the girls. Both were touched that he was risking his life to combat fascism. No one knew where Tillie was. On 10 or 11 November, Jack took the subway into Manhattan and trudged along Broadway in hopes of running into his wife who had just vowed “I’ll stay yours Jackie.” Then he shipped out for Europe. Tillie’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind failure to call her sister had sent her husband off to war feeling abandoned. Family praise for Jack seemed to indict Tillie for forgetting him.⁷¹

Tillie’s return was delayed when a snow storm grounded the plane in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Still she was home before Kathie’s first birthday, on 17 November. A letter from Jack, mailed from New York on Saturday, 11 November, awaited her. Tillie admitted, “I was in New York Saturday.” She felt she would “go crazy I think—imagining all the ifs how I could have sought you out somehow.” But she had not. Her guilt was heightened by a “Hot Cargo” column “TILLIE OLSEN just aint gonna let the Army take JACK away from her—now she’s in New York visiting him.” Then a letter from her father made her feel worse. Sam had “said goodbye to Jack, my son whom I have seen for the 1st time of my life for only a few seconds, even did not have a chance to talk with him. Will I see him again in reality? I said goodbye and kissed him. I still see him, but only in imagination.” He implored, “let us keep us together.” Contrite Tillie wrote Jack that Karla and Julie had cried because “you and I had missed each other.” At Thanksgiving, Jack’s new sister-in-law Reeva wrote that she was keeping “your old lady company by banging away a few words” on Tillie’s typewriter. Tillie was scribbling with a pen “in her own inimitable illegible way her daily communique to a guy who is sorely missed at Ye Olde Bedlam.” By then, he was seasick in the middle of the Atlantic.

By December, he was in England. He and his buddies expected to hear a Glenn Miller concert before they shipped out for France and were horrified to hear that Miller’s plane had vanished over the English Channel.⁷² Tillie sent a “New York love song,” a fantasy about making love with him after a chance meeting. She said a snapshot of him in his uniform spoke “such a physical language. I cant look at it without flaring up—you know how your shirt is open to the collarband I find myself pulling it all the way down opening it to your smooth chest, your [shirt] open to feel that smooth body.”⁷³ Tillie’s New York fantasy brought Jack to “escape to the privacy of his bunk” to reread her letters and apparently masturbate. But she also stuffed one letter with clippings about prominent men in the CIO. She told about a British officer who tried to seduce her. For him, “the proudest thing in my life is that you love me and hang on to me and won’t have any other guy but me.” Still, her references to men made him “so damned jealous of you.” When he heard nothing, he was even more uneasy.

When Jack practice-fired live mortars in England, Tillie ended her CIO blood-drive with a record number of pints for the GIs. She drove Reeva, Pauline, and the “kidlets” to Venice and “we 6 females sang much of the way—even Katush.”⁷⁴ Singing joyfully and driving erratically, Tillie barely escaped several near accidents to “the heap” and its “precious cargo.” Her patriotic work had not quite defanged the FBI, which asserted that she was still active in the Communist Party, the ILWU, and the PTA. Her husband, “Jacob Olshansky, a Communist, is in the army.”⁷⁵

Tillie’s description of her New Year’s Eve dress, with a black top that “fits like a glove” above a “white frothy skirted business,” worried him, though she promised to wear it when he returned “just to seduce you with.”

The crack in Axis powers that FDR had announced in the summer of 1943 had throughout 1944 become an ever-widening chasm. With victory now a near certainty, on New Year’s 1945, after nine months of training, Jack finally arrived on the front, apparently in the Ardennes.⁷⁶ Secrecy was crucial. Though Sam begged Tillie “to keep us in better mood” with news of Jack and to “Please! Please!” write, Tillie knew little to say. Jack could tell Tillie about “the Russians 91 miles from Berlin. . . . As usual a lot of the men are too optimistic—’20 miles a day, 100 miles to go, Berlin next week.’” Now that the Soviets were proving their value to the West, Jack even grabbed news bulletins before Tillie’s letters. He yearned “to read and re-read the words, ‘the final push to victory.’” By 31 January, Jack could tell a little about the Allied squeeze on Germany and Japan:

Russians 45 miles from Berlin. MacArthur near Manila. . . . we’ve been sitting here with our ears glued to the phone waiting for news flashes, cussing every time something goes wrong with our wire. And reliving with gusto the full important world-shaking things we’ll do at home—among them soaking in a hot tub for an hour, eating at a table with a white cloth on it; wearing riotous colors as far removed from OD [olive drab?] as possible and crawling into a clean bed with sheets, cuddling up to your old lady. Peace—it will be wonderful. . . . Remind me to name our triplets Ike, Mac and Joe.⁷⁷ If I get home soon I’ll be in debt to them for the rest of my life. Me and a few hundred million others.

Jack had not yet heard that Soviet troops had entered Auschwitz-Birkenau and found more than seven thousand barely-alive survivors among piles of skeletons. The death of a single German, murdered for trying to kill Hitler, distressed him as much as the death of Eggan.⁷⁸ Jack confessed to Tillie “falling in love with you was the swellest thing that ever happened to me.” When she did not write, he felt almost as “miserably physically homesick” as the “bad time” in New York when he “knew you were there and I couldn’t get to see you.”

With the Allies closing on Hitler from the west and the Soviets from the east, Jack was “trying to keep pace with the delirious whirlwind news. Like the Tennessee kid who sleeps next to me says, ‘seems like pretty soon those Krauts won’t have no room left to run it!’” He was “planning to breathe a little prayer for [Generals] Montgomery and Patton and then dream of the day you’ll lift the phone and hear me tell you to meet me at the Ferry building and drive me home.”

Tillie’s housekeepers kept quitting for higher-paying wartime factory jobs, but she managed a rousing thirty-fourth birthday celebration for Jack with “just your wife and your daughters—we had steak like you like it and raw onions (even Julie ate a smidgin of one in honor of you) and chocolate fudge cake with 34 candles and each one sang happy birthday and then all together (even Katushie la-la-ed along) and then the kids wrote letters while I put Katush to bed, and then they put on a show in your honor.” After pulling his heart strings with that story, Tillie pushed his panic button with another: she had gone out afterward with men “for a drink to you—we all had several—with toasts.”

In San Francisco in early April, labor and business officials gathered to hear a speech and impromptu concert by activist Paul Robeson, whose powerful baritone voice so soothed differences between the CIO, AFL, and the Chamber of Commerce that they pledged, the Dispatcher said, “postwar industrial peace” and a “new era of jobs.” When Robeson followed an African-American lullaby with a Russian one, Tillie felt near tears as she remembered Ida singing that very song.⁷⁹

Though Jack assumed he would remain a “buck private” forever, thanks to his Communist record, he was promoted to private first class, earning forty dollars, “approximately 15 smackers a month more in my pay envelope. Most of which I ought to be able to send home.” He would not say what he had done to win an infantry combat medal.⁸⁰ He admitted to feeling damaged by “the horrible destructive job of killing and keeping from being killed. The fact that the job is almost done doesn’t make it any more pleasant.”

On 12 April, radios broadcast the news of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death. That evening, when ILWU Local 6 officers arrived in the Civic Auditorium, they found the janitor, dead of a heart attack, on the floor; his radio still played Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings along with the terrible news.⁸¹ The ILWU meeting became a memorial for the leader now described by the Dispatcher as labor’s “best friend.” Hunkered down in bunkers all over former German territories, American soldiers wept freely. FDR’s death distressed Jack “more than the news of any military reverse ever did.” Roosevelt was “the symbol and voice of true unity” in the world. Whether President Truman could live up to FDR’s legacy remained to be seen.

Needing to escape “the noise, and terror and filth of the front,” by 15 April Jack got a leave to Paris, where he bought Tillie a book on Picasso, an artist who had for them been rehabilitated from purism by his antifascist Guernica. Walking along the Seine among clinging couples, Jack found Paris “without my girl” painful. She asked if he remembered when sex had warmed their bodies against the snow. Not only did he recall it, he relived “it, as well as most of our lives together, over and over and over again.” He was not consoled by her too late regret, “Wish I’d gone to Alabama.” She told about trying to stop “money bungling” and having “whoosed over to Richmond [California] today an invited guest at the new-formed Council of Social Agencies [CSA].” In her stylish suit and jaunty hat, Tillie was treated “as if I was Eleanor, Duchess o Windsor, Ingrid and Dean Gildersleeve all in one.”⁸² Clearly, her ego was very much alive now.

News of German efforts to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables” proved that fascism was worse than even Tillie had believed. When the British entered the Belsen concentration camp, they counted 35,000 corpses. Among the survivors, as Tillie quoted to Jack from local papers, “one or two feeble wasted arms came slowly up and gave a ‘v’ sign.” She realized that first-hand encounters with horrors would henceforth be “the setting” behind their lives.⁸³ Now, she felt “gladder for what you are doing” than if he had lived out the war in security. After seeing human extermination, Jack spoke only of digging trenches. He craved diversions in innocent “descriptions of your day and stories about the kids.”

When representatives of fifty nations met in San Francisco that April, Harry Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as U.S. delegate and called on them all to be “architects of the better world.” Tillie took her daughters to the Opera House to see strange new flags in wild colors and designs posted among familiar red, white, and blue geometrical patterns flapping together in the wind. Julie cried with Tillie because the United Nations was “going to stop the world from ever having a war again.”⁸⁴

Before the month’s end, Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans. His body, along with his mistress’s, was hung upside down in Milan. Written in his fortified bunker, Hitler’s own account of events still blamed the entire European disaster on the Jews. He committed suicide on 30 April. Victory over the Third Reich was tainted in the West, however, by the news that Stalin had taken the concessions of the Teheran agreement as license to renege on democratic commitments. Churchill objected, but Truman and Generals Eisenhower and Marshall acquiesced to Soviet control of countries reclaimed from Hitler, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.⁸⁵

On 6 May, the Chronicle ran a story “Witness to Horror,” showing gruesome photographs of piles of bones and bodies found in Buchenwald. Even Edward R. Morrow had “no words” for horrors that proved humankind so brutal. Hoping May would be Jack’s last month “in hell,” Tillie distracted him as requested with an account of the children’s performance for Reeva on Leon’s birthday. Her “weakness for talk” with anyone who showed up in what Reeva called “Ye Olde Bedlam” continued. She and other war-widows often speculated about the “unreal” prospect of renewed married life. Managing family and job, playing a star role in war relief and peace efforts, functioning independently, and being an often-photographed personality, Tillie could hardly imagine dwindling into a mere wife. She would have to cease “slapping cream on my face (the rare times I remember) and going to bed whenever I feel like (instead of waiting up till you come and then being hauled to bed whether I want to read or not) etc. etc.” She claimed, “I still say I can hardly wait.” This letter was “as untidy and disorganized and cluttered as the rest of my life.”

Victory in Europe Day was 8 May, after, Tillie counted, “five years, nine months, eight days.”⁸⁶ Jack wrote that the “artillery went dead on V-E day over here.” He was awarded the Bronze Star for unspecified “valiant feats of arms against the enemy.” At a V-E Day observance in Karla’s school, her sixth grade teacher read aloud one of Jack’s letters.⁸⁷ By 23 May, he was in Germany, on “an occupation job.” He mentioned the “magnitude of the destruction” but understated its impact as “extremely sobering.”

Tillie was such a bigwig she was invited to submit credentials for Who’s Who in Labor. Out of gratitude to FDR and Eleanor, she identified her political party as Democrat. She dated her marriage correctly as 29 February but incorrectly as 1936 rather than 1944.⁸⁸ On 8 June, the Labor Herald reported that Tillie Olsen was bound for New York for a National CIO War Relief Staff Conference. Despite a warning from Lillian not to burden Ida, Tillie deposited all three girls in Omaha with Ida, Sam, Vicki, Sonny, and their new baby.⁸⁹ Then she rushed on to New York. With a CIO raise, she felt “awfully prosperous” but promised Jack not to “go out & blow it wildly.”⁹⁰

Tillie may have represented CIO Post-War Planning at the UN organizational meeting. She sent the girls to the Olshanskys and was gratified to hear Eleanor Roosevelt propose a Bill of Universal Human Rights, based, it seemed, on the very ideals Ida had championed all her life. Tillie recalled being “there on that big evening [26 June] when they opened the United Nations.”⁹¹ Then she hurried to Los Angeles for a CIO board meeting, where she aired ideas about unemployed disabled veterans.⁹² Joining the girls at the Olshanskys, she shared letters from Jack and urged him to write more about himself, “can’t have enuf.”

Toddler Kathie was unsettled by her mother’s absences, by tiresome train rides to different sets of grandparents, then by having her mother rush off as soon as they got home. Not yet two, Kathie already proved a clever schemer by “stripping me of my coat hat shoes earrings every thing representing going out—the second I come home.” Jack felt a less comic, manly resistance to Tillie’s activism. He did not “want you to get a Purple Heart for over working yourself. I’m selfish enuf to want the best of you for myself. That’s the only reward I’m demanding for time spent in the army.” He had worn out her pictures by imagining making love with her. By August, he could send home “another thirty dollars toward realizing our post war dream,” a home of their own. He hoped Tillie had written more letters than he had received. He was trying to be less jealous, more proud of “the active part you’re playing.”

At the Potsdam Conference outside Berlin, beginning on 17 July, the Big Three leaders discussed dividing up Germany and finishing the war with Japan. To Churchill and Stalin, Truman confided that the United States had developed a new bomb of horrific proportions. With Japan resisting surrender, Truman believed that the new bomb could save more lives than it lost. On the morning of 6 August, an American B-29 bomber, the “Enola Gay,” dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, crushing its buildings and eradicating most of its people. A second bomb on the city of Nagasaki killed more than forty thousand civilians in a few minutes.⁹³ A special edition of Stars and Stripes proclaimed in “six-inch letters ‘Japan quits.’” After V-J Day, Jack would not be transferred to the Pacific: “Only four months ago I was fearful I wouldn’t live to see the next morning. Sweating out night after night the last ditch artillery the Germans spat at us.”⁹⁴ He signed his letter, “Goodnight my girl—with adoration and hunger—Jack.” An unreligious Jew, he was so homesick and war-weary, he dreamed about, “Christmas together, maybe.”

A few days later, Tillie was walking down to Market Street, joyous that war was vanquished and peace would prevail. She was singing to Kathie “an old country lullaby, created by a woman who never knew that she was a composer, many many centuries perhaps ago.” When she stopped at a newspaper kiosk to read bold-faced war news, Tillie saw a “little item in the paper about that peculiar light that had never been seen on earth before. All everything thousands of years of civilization had built up, and everything had been destroyed. And there were no lights except the irradiated light of bodies burning.”⁹⁵ Tillie later isolated that moment as an epiphany, a sudden recognition that she must write once more against “destruction and on the side of life. Utterances on what I call the Side of life.”⁹⁶

The CIO had contributed to the Allied war effort by its no-strike pledge, by raising a quarter of a million dollars for War Relief, by contributing 25,000 pints of blood, and by sending more than five thousand Local 6 men and women to the service. Now the CIO expected “pay-back”: V-E Day and V-J Days should be followed by “V-U,” Victory over Unemployment Day. The CIO planned a massive Labor Day parade, on 3 September 1945. Everyone was to wear a union button; women were “required to wear a dark skirt and white blouse.” Instead, Tillie wore a conspicuously tight white skirt and blouse and a red cap. During solemn announcements, she felt someone grab her cap and spun around to find Leon, just back from the Far East.⁹⁷ Tillie proved herself as much of a show-off as her outfit suggested, if a comic letter to “Tillie Olsen—you scum” can be believed:⁹⁸

I was telling good ole Lindsay that Tillie woman is slightly off her nuts as I just cant figger out what got into her going around like a hot bitch in short whitetights skirts and white tight swetters which although they don’t have built-ins a la Lana Turna do serve the purpose and make all the guys in the labor day parade feel uncomfortable ifyagetwhatImean and then that damn redhat which no one can quite figger out except that my personal thought is that she just didn’t come [comb] her hair and that’s why she gave me those goddam blackblueand purple marks on my arm and pinched Leeons buttocks for pulling sed red hat off. Period.

According to “Hot Cargo,” these shenanigans distracted from a public tribute to Jack.

On 12 September, in Singapore, Japan unconditionally surrendered. News leaked that America had interned 110,000 Japanese people in California camps, a report confirming Ida’s belief that war brutalizes all participants. In Europe, Allied forces tried to meliorate brutality by rehabilitating and resettling concentration camp survivors. Harry, now a retired lieutenant colonel, was put in charge of one thousand such “displaced persons” at a camp near Stuttgard.⁹⁹ From a new address, a block further out Lafayette Avenue, Sam begged Tillie to send news of Jack “for the cause of your mother.”¹⁰⁰ She knew only that he was in France, guarding German prisoners and shepherding them to trial.

Tillie ironed her girls’ dresses and packed their lunches in the mornings and continued traveling in “the heap” for the CIO War Relief. (She went, for example, to Crockett, Rodeo, and Martinez, northeast of San Francisco, all on one day.) In a well-publicized speech, she proclaimed that “labor is uniting the many nationalities and veterans and workers in a program of full employment.”¹⁰¹ When her job took her to Los Angeles at September’s end for another “smoky mangled State War Relief Committee meeting,” she dropped the girls off with Jack’s parents. She wrote him that Bluma hated her aged body, her “betraying crippling carcass,” so Tillie said she felt “hellish dumping the kids there, she’s not strong enuf.” Still, she habitually depended on others’ generosity, even when she knew better. This time Tillie rationalized that Karla would be “a godsend” of a helper to Jack’s mother, as Karla at almost thirteen was to Tillie herself.

Tillie described herself to Jack as “your not-deserving-you Tillie,” while he was her “very loved and needed Jack.” Then “Hot Cargo” reported on 5 October that “Somebody read that JACK OLSEN’s outfit is expected back in a month, so here’s hopin.’” Tillie said she feared that Jack would “shudder at the sight of me now.” Still, her letters were mostly “get-you-home” letters and “dog-tired I love you notes.” She worried: “Jackie if it will be longer how can I go on? Help me. When you were in combat that used to help—all our hardships [were] small in comparison—but I’m all drained now.” She knew that news of her professional successes, other men’s interest in her, and family troubles, like Kathie’s asthma attacks, disturbed Jack, but her “hop-around-mind” kept sprinkling such disconcerting information into love letters.

Even her story about a women’s weekend in a forest cabin south of Santa Clara was not quite reassuring. She took Pauline and Kathie, who was “afraid that her mother will leave her—the familiar pattern in strange places (L.A., Omaha).” One woman was mad because her lover was leaving her for the wife he had not seen in years; another was ruefully happy, having lost her husband and found a new lover; another was ecstatic over a “just returned husband.” Tillie said she and Pauline had listened “like hungry doves” to these “women in love” with such longing she dared not look at Jack’s photos, “I am too vulnerable,” an only half-reassuring remark. Kathie had become a “hilarious” mimic, and the girls invented pantomimes in one “dress-up fever” after another.

She told more consoling stories about riding with Leon Olson, Reeva, and the girls to see his parents for the first time since he was demobilized. For Tillie, the drive down was “a long memory-drenched physically beautiful ride” recalling their several “honeymoons.” When they arrived at 4:30 A.M. Avrum Olshansky was waiting for them and Bluma awakened to begin “pillowing Leon’s head on her lap & crooning. Dad hungrily watching Leon—not taking his eyes off him for a minute.” Tillie closed her narrative: “Bub I wish I had you tonight—Your red-eyed, exhausted, so-loving girl.”

As she looked down from her Castro Street window, Tillie saw the mixed race neighborhood bustling again. Returning soldiers and their families were buying property and reopening shops. The war had revitalized American industry, and the GI Bill enabled millions of returning soldiers to participate in a healthy economy. As demobilized veterans tried to readjust to domestic life, Tillie’s War Relief work became even more demanding. She turned her publicity skills from nutrition and peace to labor and veterans.¹⁰² She sent Jack good news about a CIO victory over the AFL, but she warned him that the ILWU was losing its concern for individual workers.

One evening, after a long work day, Tillie cooked “a Jack Olsen supper” for a returning soldier. They had “steak & baked potatoes & salad & peas & apple pie & cheese & Burgundy.” The older girls were offended by Kathie’s being “very very affectionate” to the wrong returning soldier. Karla had dance classes and friendships in the Castro neighborhood. She adored Jack, but his absence did not distress her as it did Julie, who was almost seven. She painfully printed out letter after letter to Jack, who usually replied jointly to both big girls. When he sent a letter to her alone, Julie so treasured it she took it to bed every night until she wore it out.¹⁰³

Tillie sat up late most nights typing speech outlines, reports, and letters. One night she sang along with a Count Basie tune on the radio, drank warm milk, checked Kathie’s breathing, and stared down at the city and over at Twin Peaks. She begged Jack to confide in her his experiences escorting former S.S. officers to trial and to “please please cry on my shoulder.” His daily letters made her guilty for “gypping” him when she failed to write. Leon had decided to become a printer’s apprentice and advised her about GI Bill financing; Tillie speculated “in 4 years—oh-boy—he can start lending us money again.”

Jack was supposed to board ship on 1 December, so Tillie proclaimed 1 November “The first day of the last month without you.” Then, on 4 November, papers announced that the 66^th Division was one of those “not scheduled to come home in 1945.”¹⁰⁴ When Tillie read the “cruel news,” she scribbled: “I want you so now,” but she warned Jack that she was not glamorous in her Mother-Hubbard nightgown and his bed slippers. She hoped, “it just cant be more than 7 weeks for you.” Papers ran articles on the “Lucky Guys” who were returning from war and launched campaigns to “Bring Our Troops Back!”¹⁰⁵ Tillie “got me two bargain hats.” She asked, “Darling what kind of robes do you like on females? Silky jobs, quilted jobs, sexy jobs, pinks, blues, prints or what? What colors do you like on, for me?”

December holiday crowds signed petitions to President Truman and Congress to bring all troops home. To the irritation of HUAC, the California Labor School gave tuition, housing, and subsidies under the GI Bill of Rights. Tillie hoped that The Story of G.I. Joe, though not so good a movie as All Quiet on the Western Front, would imprint on people’s hearts the terrible price of war.¹⁰⁶ The Dispatcher argued that the atom bomb’s formula should be entrusted to the United Nations so the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would never be repeated.

Then the “Hot Cargo” column reported: “Get the Welcome Mat out—JACK OLSEN is on his way home—called TILLIE from Virginia and she hasn’t been able to talk sense since” (no doubt a snide reference to her stammer). Jack was in California by Friday, 28 December, when Tillie got a “darling note” from him, saying he was slightly drunk. She sent him a “special dollar” for ten more beers. Still, Jack might as well be in France, except that she would soon hear his voice on the phone saying “drive me home.”

By the end of 1945, Tillie felt no more inclination to kill her ego. Her vitality, smarts, dedication, and what Jack called her turbulence had made her a celebrity in War Relief efforts. She had transformed herself into a joyous mother and a passionate partner, roles that he loved. She was also now a prolific journalist and an effective political force, roles about which he was decidedly ambivalent. She was thrilled that Jack would soon add balance to her life. Still, she had no intention of giving up “my livelihood, my contribution to society, and my reputation,” even for him.

CHAPTER 8

WAR-RELIEF HEROINE