"Joining self-assertion with interdependence, Olsen's vision is a strongly feminist one. When women live only through their families, she suggests, they arc denied their own individuality and any possibility for a larger connection to humankind. As Olsen herself recognizes, at its core this vision is also a Jewish one, drawn from her Jewish socialist background. As she explained in a recent interview, this background, which she calls Yiddishkeit, taught her "knowledge and experience of injustice, of discrimination, of oppression, of genocide and of the need to act against them forever and whenever they appear," as well as "an absolute belief in the potentiality of human beings." As Olsen says, "What is Yiddish in me ... is inextricable from what is woman in me, from woman who is mother.""
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Short story writers from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesStanford University facultyMembers of the Communist Party USA
Original Language: English
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Sources
Joyce Antler, Introduction to America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers (1990)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen
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Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1913–January 1, 2007) was a Jewish American writer who was associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.
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