Grace Paley

Bio

Grace Paley's Ukrainian parents, young anti-czarist revolutionaries, had been imprisoned so often that in 1906 her grandparents got them out of Russia and sent them to America. This was a year after they had witnessed the pogrom of 1905 and the murder of their brother by the Czarist police. The family history influenced Paley in her future political activism and shows up in her stories.

She was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1922. By then her father had become a doctor and she grew up in a comfortable middle-class home, on a street where most people were out of work. She remembers the men hanging around during the depression, not knowing what to do with themselves. Asked if she saw gangs in her Bronx neighborhood, she replied, “only the Trotskyites and the Stalinists.”

Her parents remained as staunch Socialists as they were anti-Soviet. To explain the difference, Paley says when she was ten she was sent to a Socialist camp, where the children were “Falcons.” At the Communist camp the children were called “Pioneers.”

But the neighborhood was Jewish. “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,” she says. At home she heard mostly Yiddish and Russian and the pulse of these tongues is heard in all her fiction.

The family was strongly Jewish, but not religious. They were “devout atheists.” They didn't go to synagogue, but on Yom Kippur, the women in the “shul” two doors away sometimes fainted during the fast and were brought to her father's medical office. Her grandmother sometimes went to synagogue and Grace accompanied her. At home they always had big Seders.

As a child, it was her sister Jean, fourteen years older, who encouraged her interest in writing poetry, and by her teens she was writing seriously. Though she graduated from high school at 15, she was unhappy at college and never got a degree. She studied briefly with W. H. Auden at the New School for Social Research and it was he who urged her to write in the language in which she lived, rather than echo the literary ideals she read. Her first poems were published in the magazine Experiment when she was 21, but due to shyness she waited 25 years before submitting work again.

At 20, she married Jess Paley and had two children. They separated in the late 1960s and she married Bob Nichols in 1972. During a period when her children were at school and she was home in poor health, she began her first fiction. She had always wanted to try writing prose and took the first line of her first story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” from something her husband's aunt had said: “I was popular in certain circles and I wasn't no thinner then.” She felt she had discovered her “other ear--the ear of home, your own street, your own place in the world, your parents' mouths.” This voice, usually female, was urban, plain spoken, social-political and non-heroic. It resonated through three decades of her fiction. “Language is so amazing,” she says. “It can be put together in so many different ways and voices that you can almost tell who's talking….It's a mixture of literary and neighborhood sound. It's more a sound than anything else.” She goes on,” You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it….Most pleasure in writing…is inventing.”

Her first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, was published in 1959, followed by Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in 1974, and Later the Same Day in 1985. Leaning Forward, her first collection of poems, was also published in 1985 and New and Collected Poems in 1992. In addition, Paley and her friend Vera Williams produced a collection of stories, poems, reflections and illustrations. Called 365 Reasons Not to Have Another War, it was published as a calendar by the War Resisters League in 1988 and reissued by the Feminist Press in 1991 as Long Walks and Intimate Talks. Her newest publication, Just As I Thought, is a collection of essays and political memoir.

In 1985, Philip Roth wrote: “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.”

Among the many awards she has earned are the 1994 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts, the 1992 REA Award for Short Stories, the 1989 Edith Wharton Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1961), a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987), and a PEN Faulkner Prize for fiction (1985). In 1989 Governor Mario Cuomo named her the first official New York State Writer.

Grace Paley is equally known for her political activism in the anti-nuclear movement, the peace movement, feminist movement and, more recently, the ecological movement. She describes herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” Following in her parents' footsteps, her life has always been linked to political issues and she frequently put her writing to the side while she took to the streets to protest. During the Cold War, Paley and a group of American activists visited the Soviet Union to talk to the dissidents and carry words of support. She states, “It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time.”

Though she is widely acknowledged as one of America's great writers, she is still sometimes grouped with women writers or Jewish American writers. Paley is not disturbed by this. “I feel that everything I am enhances the word 'writer'. It doesn't modify it. I feel being Jewish has been very important to my writing, being a woman has been extremely important to my writing-all those things that I am have made me what I am and what I write about and how I write. So I'm not offended at all….But I think they should start calling them (men) 'male writers.' That would solve the whole problem. Nobody would feel bad, except the men.”

Appearances on CUNY TV

Jewish Women in America