Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. She was considered one of the great writers of voice of the last century.
The daughter of Russian immigrants who arrived in New York around the turn of the century, Paley was raised in the Bronx. At home, her parents spoke Russian and Yiddish, and Paley grew up within two cultures, influenced by the old world as well as the new. From her surroundings, she gleaned the raw material for her short stories, and both her Russian-Jewish heritage and her perceptions of New York street life pervade her work.
In short and sometimes plotless tales, Paley plumbs the lives of working-class New Yorkers, mapping out what New York Review of Books contributing critic Michael Wood called "a whole small country of damaged, fragile, haunted citizens." Rather than action, Paley relies on conversation to establish character, reproducing Jewish, Black, Irish, and other dialects with startling accuracy.
The New Yorker's Alexandra Schwartz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for 2014, says: “There’s a case to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century.”
Here is a critical description of her style by George Saunders, American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels:
“There’s an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive (caused by friction) world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another.
“You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one’s personality receding and being replaced by the writer’s consciousness.
“Paley’s approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn’t so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe: what we need is to be reminded to love it, and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.”
(George Saunders. “Grace Paley, the Saint of Seeing.” The New Yorker. March 03, 2017.)
Understanding different perspectives is so vital to our mission of “loving the world.” Paley's stories are alive with characters whose values and heritages present novel situations to those of us living our lives in places with largely singular ethnic and religious experiences, Grace Paley opens a door to put us into close contact with those people different from us. In doing so, she allows us new perceptions … and likely leads us to greater understandings.
"The Loudest Voice"
For the Christmas season, I thought you might like to read an excerpt from Paley’s short story “The Loudest Voice.” The amusing tale – with an important theme – was published in 1959 and follows Shirley Abramowitz, a young Jewish girl who is asked to be the narrator in her school’s Christmas pageant.
The story satirizes attempts to “Americanize” Jewish students from immigrant families.
“My voice is the loudest” so says Shirley
Abramowitz, a Jewish girl that is invited to take part in a play,
mainly on account of her “stamina” and the aforementioned loud
voice (a quintessentially Jewish characteristic), but upsets her
mother, Clara Abramowitz, who feels that the participation in the
ceremony of the Goyim (gentile, non-Jewish) is wrong, though her
husband disagrees…
Misha Abramowitz, her
father, says you are in America, in Palestine, the Arabs would be
eating you alive … some joke, Ha?”
Of the story, Judy Bolton-Fasman, writer of memoir and creative non-fiction for Jewish Boston says …
“There is never a question that Shirley’s Jewishness and that of her friends is central to their lives. The Cramers may be in charge of selling tickets to the Christmas extravaganza, and Marty Groff may be a convincing Jesus as he wears his father’s prayer shawl, but in the end these sweet, bumbling grade-school actors who find themselves in a nativity scene are the most Jewish of Jews.
“After the play, Shirley Abramowitz falls asleep to the grownups talking in the kitchen: 'They debated a little in Yiddish, then fell in a puddle of Russian and Polish. What I understood next was my father, who said, 'Still and all, it was certainly a beautiful affair, you have to admit, introducing us to the beliefs of a different culture.’”
(Judy Bolton-Fasman. “And Then: Grace Paley’s 'The Loudest Voice.'” Jewish Boston. December 14, 2020.)
You may consider these
questions as you read “The Loudest Voice”: Does assimilation
require the loss of one’s native cultural identity? Who “owns”
a tradition? Can traditions like Christmas be shared?
A holiday favorite, this highly anthologized short story is read by the late author Grace Paley. Despite the story's popularity, Grace Paley's 1998 reading of it at Vermont Public Radio for New Letters On The Air was the first time she ever recorded it. It was published in Grace Paley, The Collected Short Stories published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Please read my excerpt from the story, but also be sure to follow the link and listen to Grace Paley read the entire short story, “The Loudest Voice.” Just click here to access the Vermont Public Radio recording: https://beta.prx.org/stories/194010
The Loudest Voice
By Grace Paley
(… just around the comer, is a red brick building that has been old for many years. Every morning the children stand before it in double lines which must be straight. They are not insulted. They are waiting anyway.
I am usually among them. I am, in fact, the first, since I begin with "A".
One cold morning the monitor tapped me on the shoulder. "Go to Room 409, Shirley Abramowitz" he said. I did as I was told. I went in a hurry up a down staircase to Room 409, which contained sixth-graders. I had to wait at the desk without wiggling until Mr. Hilton, their teacher, had time to speak.
After five minutes he said, "Shirley?"
"What?" I whispered.
He said, "My! My! Shirley Abramowitz! They told me you had a particularly loud, clear voice and read with lots of expression. Could that be true?"
"Oh yes," I whispered.
"In that case, don’t be silly; I might very well be your teacher someday. Speak up, speak up."
"Yes," I shouted"
"More like it," he said. "Now, Shirley, can you put a ribbon in your hair or a bobby pin? It’s too messy."
"Yes!" I bawled."
"Now, now, calm down." He turned to the class. "Children, not a sound. Open at page 39. Read till 52. When you finish, start again." He looked me over once more. "Now, Shirley, you know, I suppose, that Christmas is coming. We are preparing a beautiful play. Most of the parts have been given out. But I still need a child with a strong voice, lots of stamina. Do you know what stamina is? You do? Smart kid. You know, I heard you read "The Lord is my shepherd" in Assembly yesterday. I was very impressed. Wonderful delivery. Mrs. Jordan, your teacher, speaks highly of you. Now listen to me, Shirley Abramowitz, if you want to take the part and be in the play, repeat after me, ‘I swear to work harder than I ever did before.’ "
I looked to heaven and said at once, "Oh, I swear." I kissed my pinky and looked at God.
"That is an actor’s life, my dear," he explained. "Like a soldier’s, never tardy or disobedient to his general, the director. Everything," he said, "absolutely everything will depend on you."
That afternoon, all over the building, children scraped and scrubbed the turkeys and the sheaves of corn off the schoolroom windows. Goodbye Thanksgiving. The next morning a monitor brought red paper and green paper from the office. We made new shapes and hung them on the walls and glued them to the doors.
The teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood. My best friend, Evie, was prone to evil, but she did not get a single demerit for whispering. We learned, "Holy Night" without an error. "How wonderful!" said Miss Glace, the student teacher. "To think that some of you don’t even speak the language!" We learned "Deck the Halls" and "Hark! The Herald Angels" … they weren’t ashamed and we weren’t embarrassed.
Oh, but when my mother heard about it all, she said to my father, "Misha, you don’t know what’s going on there. Cramer is the head of the Tickets Committee."
"Who?" asked my father. "Cramer? Oh yes, an active woman."
"Active? Active has to have a reason. Listen," she said sadly, "I’m surprised to see my neighbors making tra-la-la for Christmas."
My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided: "You’re in America Clara, you wanted to come here. In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas … Some joke, Ha?"
"Very funny, Misha. What is becoming of you? If we came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants, and instead we fall into a creeping pogrom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what’s the joke? Ach, Misha, your idealism is going away."
"So is your sense of humor."
"That I never had, but idealism you had a lot of."
"I’m the same Misha Abramovitch, I didn’t change an iota. Ask anyone."
"Only ask me," says my mama, may she rest in peace. "I got the answer."
Meanwhile the neighbors had to think of what to say too.
Marty’s father said: "You know, he has a very important part, my boy."
"Mine also," said Mr. Sauerfeld.
"Not my boy!" said Mrs. Kleig. "I said to him no. The answer is no. When I say no! I mean no!"
The rabbi’s wife said, "It’s disgusting!" But no one listened to her. Under the narrow sky of God’s great wisdom she wore a strawberry-blond wig.
Every day was busy and full of experience. I was Right-hand Man. Mr. Hilton said: "How could I get along without you, Shirley!"
He said: "Your mother and father ought to get down on their knees every night and thank God for giving them a child like you."
He also said: "You’re absolutely a pleasure to work with, my dear, dear child."
Sometimes he said: "For godsakes, what did I do with the script? Shirley! Shirley! Find it."
Then I answered quietly: Here it is, Mr. Hilton."
Once in a while, when he was very tired, he would cry out: "Shirley, I’m just tired of screaming at those kids. Will you tell Ira Pushkov not to come in till Lester points to that star the second time?"
Then I roared: "Ira Pushkov, what’s the matter with you? Dope! Mr. Hilton told you five times already, don’t come in till Lester points to that star the second time."
"Ach, Clara," my father asked, "what does she do there till six o’clock she can’t even put the plates on the table?"
"Christmas," said my mother coldly.
"Ho! Ho!" my father said. "Christmas. What’s the harm? After all, history teaches everyone. We learn from reading this is a holiday from pagan times also, candles, lights, even Hanukkah. So if they think it’s a private holiday, they’re only ignorant, not patriotic. What belongs to history belongs to all men. You want to go back to the Middle Ages? Is it better to shave your head with a second-hand razor? Does it hurt Shirley to learn to speak up? It does not. So maybe someday she won’t live between the kitchen and the shop. She’s not a fool."
I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.
That night my father kissed me and said with great interest in my career, "Shirley, tomorrow’s your big day. Congrats."
"Save it," my mother said. Then she shut all the windows in order to prevent tonsillitis.
In the morning it snowed. On the street corner a tree had been decorated for us by a kind city administration. In order to miss its chilly shadow our neighbors walked three blocks east to buy a loaf of bread. The butcher pulled down black window shades to keep the colored lights from shining on his chickens. Oh, not me. On the way to school, with both my hands I tossed it a kiss of tolerance. Poor thing, it was a stranger in Egypt.
(Not the end. The entire story should be accessed by clicking the link above. Thank you.)
READ THE ENTIRE STORY HERE
http://www.thejkc.org/clientuploads/2017/JEX/Paley%20the%20Loudest%20Voice%20Salon%201.pdf
VT Edition. Grace Paley Reads "The Loudest Voice" January 23, 2017
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