Grace Paley, 1922-2007

Jewish socialism influenced Grace Paley's life and literature.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

"I lived my childhood in a world so dense with Jews that I thought we were the great imposing majority and kindness had to be extended to the others because, as my mother said, everyone wants to live like a person. In school I met my friend Adele, who, together with her mother and father, were not Jewish. Despite this, they often seemed to be in a good mood." Grace Paley's matter‑of‑fact Jewishness and wry humor, plus that "stretch to the stranger" entailed by Exodus, mark her offhand statements as well as her tightly crafted stories. Though her parents were secular, they held a Seder at which her father (in Russian or Yiddish or English) would tell how they had been "brought out of bondage for some reason…. We had been strangers and slaves in Egypt and therefore knew what we were talking about when we cried out against pain and oppression. In fact, we were obligated by knowledge to do so."

 

In her stories, Paley's commitment to social justice and political activism shows up almost casually, as an inevitable part of the scene, while human elements hold foreground: dogged mothers, gutsy spinsters, brash children, immigrant parents trying to navigate the "creeping pogrom" (The Loudest Voice) that is Christian America--and, always, talk, schmoozing. "My father talked an awful lot, when he had time, my aunts told stories," says Paley. "You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it…. Most pleasure in writing, you know, is inventing." Especially her strong‑mettled women, with a Yiddish or life‑worn or street‑smart pulse to their speech, invigorate the stories of someone who all her life has been listening gratefully.

 

Grace Paley was born on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, New York, to Ukrainian‑born anti-czarist revolutionaries who had been exiled to Siberia around 1904 and were

 

…present for the pogrom of

1905 in which

our Rusya our brother our uncle

waiving the workers' flag

was murdered.

 

Paley's parents came to America in 1905, and her father became a doctor. Grace briefly attended Hunter College and New York University, married at 19, had two children, and was separated soon afterward. Alongside the urban neighborhood social‑political life that was to furnish her stories, she studied with W.H. Auden at the New School and wrote only poetry into her 30s (collected in Leaning Forward [1985] and New and Selected Poems [1992]).Her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love (1959), was greeted by Philip Roth: "An understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike. Grace Paley has deep feelings, a wild imagination, and a style [of] toughness and bumpiness." Her later collections were Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)and Later the Same Day (1985).

 

An often‑used photo shows a middle‑aged Grace Paley outdoors at a wintertime protest, standing in a down jacket and wool cap, a quizzical expression on her hands thrust into pockets under a white smock with crude lettering: MONEY ARMS WAR PROFITS WALL STREET. Like Tillie Olsen and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as her nearer contemporaries Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, Paley has acted on her politics. Sometimes she gets criticized for taking unbalanced views--chiefly of the conflict in Vietnam. Rooted stubbornly in the Jewish socialism of her childhood, Paley's political feelings are "almost always," she says, "on the side of the underdog."

 

Her best storytelling though, seems simple without in the least being simplistic or tendentious. Strict plotting, claims the daughter in A Conversation With My Father, "takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life." Reading to an audience, Paley stands a little like Norman Mailer, firmly spread-legged, on a booster behind the podium, chewing gum, delivering dialogue and narrative in a Bronx accent also from her childhood.

 

Asked about influences, Paley will mention James Joyce and also Gertrude Stein, who declared in The Making of Americans, "The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old, that is the story that I mean to tell, for that is what really is, and what I really know." Paley also muses on the Jewish storyteller Isaac Babel, "When I read him now, I think that he had the same grandparents I had and that grandparents influenced him in Russia and me here."