On Grace Paley’s birthday, revisit Alexandra Schwartz on the activist, whose fiction is peopled with the politically minded but never preaches.
Her father complains that she’s left everything out. For instance: How did the woman look? Who were her parents that she should end up like this? The narrator tries again:
Politics ran in Paley’s blood. Her childhood was “rather typical Jewish socialist” in that she believed Judaism and socialism to be one and the same. Isaac wouldn’t go near a synagogue, so Paley accompanied Babushka to shul on the holidays. Babushka, for her part, entertained Paley by recounting the heated arguments that had taken place around her table in the old country among her four children: Isaac the Socialist, Grisha the Anarchist, Luba the Zionist, and Mira the Communist.
Paley dropped out of high school at sixteen. She took classes at Hunter and at City College but never got a degree. At nineteen, she married Jess Paley, a soldier, and went to live with him at Army bases in the South and the Midwest before moving to a basement apartment on West Eleventh Street to wait out the war, supporting herself with a string of secretarial jobs.
Paley grew up in three languages: Russian at home, Yiddish in the street, and English everywhere else, a blend that marks all her work. In this first story, you hear notes of Isaac Bashevis Singer; you hear Babel, a little Chekhov, some Joyce, all active influences, but above all you hear Paley inventing her own American English, one that clucks and sings. Like many a Paley creation, Rose is a ribald genius of home-brewed figurative language.
In that time, the sixties came and went, and the women’s movement arrived. “The buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness” of second-wave feminism gave Paley a definitive framework for analyzing the world, and a community to survive it with.
The disappearing world is Paley’s great topic, and not only when it comes to the threat of nuclear war. In “The Long Distance Runner,” Faith goes for a jog in Brighton Beach, where she grew up. Her block, once Jewish, is now black; she is an interloper, this out-of-breath middle-aged white woman in shorts, viewed with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. A Girl Scout shows her around her old apartment building, then becomes frightened of the “honky lady” and calls for help.
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