"Grace Paley"

The essay outlines Grace Paley’s life and its intertwining with her literary and political career. She was an American short story writer and poet as well as cultural and political figure. The complexity of her writing comes from mixing techniques, forms, and genres with a wide breadth of subjects. A pacifist, feminist, ecologist, secular Jew, Paley was always politically active. Growing up on stories of discrimination, racism, and exile, in an environment of radicalism, daughter of revolutionary Russian Jewish immigrants, Paley was sensitive to discrimination and intolerance. Differences of race, religion, class, gender, and age coexist in her narrative world, and human rights are the crucial question. The fear and inability to acknowledge these differences and accept anyone different from us can cause an "intersection of oppressions." Through her poetics and in her life Paley suggested the best way to find one's own identity was by expressing one's subjectivity while acknowledging differences and welcoming the "other." Paley also addressed the pain of the historical experiences of different groups – the Holocaust, slavery, dictatorships, and wars – with wit and irony. She described racism as "the most severe inherited illness of the United States." Her humor and her matter-of-factness were among her most Jewish characteristics, clearly evident in her use of a colloquial but precise language, rich in oblique biblical references. A gender perspective is at the core of Paley's work. Paley shares with her narrators and characters a "dislike" for plot, "the absolute line between two points," "not for literary reasons," they explain, but because it limits hope: "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."