The first time I met Grace Paley, who died Aug. 22 at age 84, I almost broke her forearm.
I had picked her up at the airport with her husband, Bob, when she came here to speak as part of “Women Who Shook the Jewish World,” a series I created at the Osher Marin JCC. She had her hand sticking out the window when I hit the electric window roll up control. She cried out, and I pressed the button backward as hard as I could. I was mortified. She kept apologizing … she had to have a hand out, free to feel the air, the flowing movement.
It would seem an inauspicious introduction, but it didn’t bruise our friendship.
It is, of course, preposterous of me to think that I was her friend. But she was so outgoing, so interested in meeting new people (even in her late 70s), so warm and funny that she led me to believe it.
I visited her with my husband at her home — no, really her shack — in Vermont the following winter. Again I inadvertently imposed on her patience. She lived at the end of a narrow rural road covered in more than a foot of fresh snow. Although we had lived on the edge of the “snow belt” in upstate New York for nine years, our skills at snowplowing with a compact car had evidently gotten rusty. We left the car and trudged up the hill, fortunate to be saved by her son-in-law, who happened to come by that night.
Apologies on both sides again.
I was worried about my track record, but when Bob showed us to our room upstairs — rather a mess with stacks of books and sticky notes with ideas for his book everywhere, and pulled out the chamber pot — I felt that maybe they did regard us as friends. Otherwise, how could you explain the hospitality, and certainty, that we would not be in the least bit put off by having to go in a pot.
When I first invited Grace to speak, I apologized that our budget did not allow us to fly her first or business class. “I wouldn’t fly that way if you had the budget,” she said. Not really a surprise for an author who had an amazing gift for speaking the language of plain Jewish women — sitting on their stoop in New York, sticking their heads out the window to see who’s hollering on the street, cooking their meager cabbage dinner. They never traveled first class either.
After the niceties of tea, a couple more apologies from me about the nearly broken forearm, etc., Grace asked me what got into me to bring her to speak as someone who “shook the Jewish world.” It was not just that she was one of the first women to enter the pantheon of Jewish American writers (so heavily dominated by the male trio of Malamud, Bellow and Roth). It was not just that she exemplified from very early on in her career that literature and activism go hand in hand; that you say your piece with your voice in a book and with your feet at demonstrations, rallies and sit-ins.
She probably never met an anti-war opportunity she didn’t like and seize, a chance for peace activism she didn’t take. She also always kept her presence in local ways, in her two communities of New York and Vermont. It was, first and foremost, that she shook the pillars that held up the canopy of legitimate Jewish voices.
She cracked the dominations of Jewish discourse by men, rabbis and scholars. She gave us the voices of Jewish women, of ordinary people, of the uneducated, of the hard-luck shlemiels and shlemazels. And their eloquence, through her writing, was stunning. Somehow, in her gift for giving them voice she made the ordinary breathtaking, the mundane captivating, the crude delicately eloquent.
She was, indeed, a writer of great grace, like her name.
Grace?
How did a Jewish girl born to poor immigrant Russian Jewish communists in New York in the early 1920s come to be called Grace, I asked her. “Such a goyishe name” — she took the words out of my mouth (at this point still holding back that part of the sentence out of politeness).
It turns out her older sister named her when she was born, insisting to the greenhorn parents that this was a really good American name. They bought it. Who would have guessed it would be so apt?
Yehi zichra baruch — may her memory be for a blessing.
Rachel Biale lives in Berkeley and is the regional director of Progressive Jewish Alliance