There are the books that never come into being, although they are urgently needed.

And there are books that come so late that you wonder how that's possible.

One can be glad that Tillie Olsen prevented the one thing and achieved the last, albeit almost fifteen years after her death in the case of the German editions of her texts - and thus indescribably late.

Elena Witzeck

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Olsen, who came from a Russian-Jewish family, was nineteen and had no school qualifications when she became pregnant and was in his fifties when her four short stories were published in 1961 - about four children, the search for work and their father, who "couldn't take it any longer ' to share in poverty, as he wrote in his farewell letter.

It was the depression era, before welfare and job creation.

Olsen writes about it in "I stand here and iron", and this sentence, the first words of her first short story, is the key to her work.

Small poetic social studies

They are stories of three generations of a family, small poetic social studies.

These pictures: How the narrator runs home from the bus to the apartment where her child is lying, because every lost minute counts for her.

How the drunk Whitey comes back in "Hey, Sailor, where are we going?" and knocks one last time on the family who has always been there for him, his restlessness, and how he realizes that for someone like him it is in their world There is no more room, "everyone inside, everyone in their shoe box from home, in front of the flickering television".

And says goodbye.

Or how the sick woman, who after eight children no longer wants to socialize, thinks about the unbearable energy of her husband “with his eloquent stories”: “He dribbled vinegar over me all his life.

I am well marinated.

How can I be honey now?” And how she suddenly understands the narrowness of a woman's life in old age, because life with children absorbs everything.

What's left after that?

Life "shrunken like a coffin" and "life wasted everywhere".

With which Olsen, after years of meticulous part-time paperwork alongside jobs, family and her commitment to the women's movement, showed that what has to do with motherhood, the female body, the domestic and its inexhaustible work is of course part of literature - and that big whole, the political, is in it.

There is a tenderness in their language, in the observations for the nuances in human togetherness, its inadequacy, a magical gift of observation and high standards: So much for the aesthetics of the political.

Essays with the tone of someone with nothing to lose

After that, Tillie Olsen gave lectures and received grants.

Her essays, which have now been published in German under the title What is missing – Suppressed Voices in Literature, have the tone of one who has nothing to lose.

Olsen combines the experience of the writing woman with all the obstacles that writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described in their unproductive phases, from Kafka to Woolf to Rilke, in diaries and letters, and thus explains in the canon the reasons for the silence even of those who never have the opportunity to do so with their starting conditions, whose biographies do not go down in stories.

She gave the lecture "The Silence of Literature" in 1962, which was fascinatingly early in view of his stirring words.