Jew-ish

Ask anybody who knows Grace Paley's writing, or who knew Grace, if she was a “Jewish” writer, and you’ll likely get the same stunned look you’d get if you inquired whether the sky was blue. Press on, and you’ll get an elaboration as slippery as an inventory of the firmament's “color.” That Paley escapes, Houdini-like, from all the categories that would contain her – that the impact of her prose and her poetry is registered in our solar plexus – is the frustrating, and delicious, challenge to our determination to include her in our curricula and our bibliographies. But my own attempt to try to define Paley's elusive legacy as a “Jewish” writer is also motivated by the sense that she articulated a secret we desperately need to rediscover: about belonging that is not tribal, about a moral place where compassion is the other side of comedy, about a Yiddish- and Newyorkish-inflected universe presided over by a vigilant woman with a pot of soup and a pocketful of poems. I will argue that Paley practiced “Jew-ish” in the generic spaces she inhabited, from the human-size prose of crowded city dwellings and contested public spaces to the endless vistas of Vermont and the “open/closed/open”1 spaces of poetic lines

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