CHAPTER SIX - The Aging Process: Late Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

7. Insights from modern jewish literature

Literature, as always, can illuminate the human condition and offer an understanding of the experience of “the other”: in this context, referring to the elderly person, near the end of life.

Two tender and revealing portraits from twentieth century Jewish literature come to mind.

7a. The first is Tillie Olsen’s stunning 1960 story, “Tell Me a Riddle”, long regarded as one of the greatest short stories in contemporary English literature.

This third-person story tells of the last phase of a forty-year long marriage of two working-class American Jews, originally from Russia. After years of a common life together their relationship begins to disintegrate as they go their separate ways near the end of their life, each with different hopes for, and needs from, their last years.

The wife, Eva, wants to separate herself from all the years of human contact that have invariably created ever-increasing demands on her, and it becomes clear in the course of the story that she is approaching death. Exhausted by the demands of her family and all those surrounding her, she withdraws into herself, shunning human contact and rejecting the attempts of everyone seeking to reconnect her with the world around her - her husband, her children, her doctors.
On her death bed, she finally goes back in her mind to her years in the revolutionary underground in Russia before her journey to the new world, clearly the great climax of her life. This, it becomes clear, right at the end, is what has given her life its hidden meaning all these years.

One of the great insights that this story can suggest is how little we understand the world of the elderly and that what we see is not necessarily what really exists. The inner world of an elderly person might be very clear to them and very unclear to us, even to those who have lived with the old person for many years.
Therefore, what we try and do for the older person, with what we feel to be their best interests in mind might, in fact, be completely opposite to what they really need and want.

7b. Another set of stories, stunning in their starkness and their sadness, are those written by Anzia Yezierska near the end of her long life.

Yezierska, who immigrated to America in 1890 at the age of about nine, was one of the most prominent interpreters of the Jewish immigrant experience. She gained fame and temporary fortune in the 1920s when her English language stories were accepted by an interested public, including Hollywood producers who were keen to access the immigrant experience in film.

The late 1960’s found her alone and fairly isolated in a poor rooming house in New York where the tenants were strangers to each other. It was in these squalid and undignified surroundings that she wrote her last, autobiographical, stories, some of which were published in her lifetime and some, only after her death.
The stories are self-pitying, like much of her literature, but they provide an astonishingly sad entrance into the world of the lonely forgotten elderly who live with little dignity and little self-respect, far from their families.

Three stories in particular are worthy of note:

• “A Window Full of Sky” tells of the humiliations that the narrator suffers when she decides, after an illness, to apply to go into an old-age home. It recounts the patronising treatment that she receives from those who should know better.
• “Take Up Your Bed and Walk”, recounts how the dehumanising isolation in which the narrator finds herself is all too briefly broken by a couple of young students who seek out the aging writer and bring youth and life into her sad world.
• “The Open Cage” tells the story of the narrator, trapped in her boarding house and helpless, finding a trapped bird. She wishes to cage the bird, in order to provide herself with contact with something living, but finally realises that the bird should have freedom - even if she herself is deprived of it.

There are few stories that give a more chilling insight into the sad condition of the Category B elderly.