Grace Paley
and
Tillie Olsen:
Radical Jewish humanists
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T.LLIE Olsen and Grace Paley,
friends for a number of years, share a vision and an expression of
that vision that derive largely from the Jewish immigrant socialist
tradition. They are both, significantly so, Jewish writers.
Why insist on their Jewishness? Because others have insisted
that secular, radical Jewish writers are not Jews at all. "The truth
is," Allen Guttman writes, "that there has been for the Jews of the
Diaspora a negative correlation between Judaism and political
radicalism .... 'Jewish' radicals have actually been converts to the
secular faith in revolution." I
But why bother arguing? Why do I care if writers like Grace
Paley and Tillie Olsen are seen as non-Jews? Within every group
that defines itself as a repository of sp"ecial values-bh~cks, feminists, Irish-some are seen as representing the group and some are
seen as apostates. It's part of the process by which a gr9up.defines
itself.
I care because if Olsen and Paley are not Jewish writers~ theil
how am I? And yet I see myself, though not a practicing Jew,. as
formed by Jewish culture. I have to reject any attempt to define a
fixed Jewish identity-especially one that leaves out those aspects
of Jewish tradition with which I feel most connected. If I acceRt
Commentary's version of the Jewish tradition, I am denied my own.
heritage as a radical, secular, humanist Jew.
",38:; RESPONSE
Philip Roth once wrote, "I can only connect with the Jewish
people as I apprehend their God. And until such time as I do
apprehend him, there will continue to exist the question: how are
you connected to me as another man is not?"2
It's a difficult question. In asking it, Roth' is not denying
connection, just rejecting easy answers, the fruit of "nostalgia or
sentimentality or . . . will."
Let me try to answer. A Jewish writer may not use specifically
Jewish themes or materials; may even be an atheist, and yet
express a Jewish Diaspora tradition that includes:
(a) intense identification not with the tribe so much as with the
collectivity of the oppressed-including Jews; identification with
suffering people and experience of the need to share and relieve
their pain.
(b) critical detachment from ordinary institutions and culturally held truths. Jews, E. L. Doctorow has said, "take exception to
prevailing mythologies."3 Josephine Knopp speaks of putting Judaism on trial. But Jews put more than Judaism on trial. As Thorstein
Veblen argued in his 1919 essay, "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of
Jews,"
It is by loss of allegiance, or at best by force of a divided allegiance to the
people of his origin that [the inteHectual Jew] finds himself in the vanguard
of modern inquiry. , .. The first requisite for, .. any work of inquiry ...
is a skeptical frame of mind.
And the Jew in the Diaspora, the outsider working on the inside,
has this frame of mind. "He is a skeptic by force of circumstances
over which he has no controL" It is the tension between traditional
Judaism and modern life that gives the Jew his valuable critical
ability.4 But not only this tension. Judaism is essentially iconoclastic. "The acknowledgment of God is, fundamentally, the negation
of idols," Erich Fromm writes. 5 And by idols Fromm means any
fixed system of authority external to living experience.
, (c) A longing for a world in which ordinary life would be holy,
No wonder Jews have been mistrusted by dictators, by governments, even by radical political parties.
Of course, there is no generalization you can make about
Jewish writers to which someone can't object, Do you think only
PALEY AND OLSEN: RADIC~L JEWISH ~TS
Jews do that? So Peretz elaborates on the irony that hllmanjustice
must exceed divine justice. Doesn't 'Camus? Aren't French Writ~
ers, English writers, Swedish writers as expert in suffering? Qid
Chekhov need to be Jewish? And yet ... There's something about
the writing of even secular Jews that I am aware oras originating in
Jewish culture, in a Jewish way of seeing. I'm thinking of Kafka
when I say that-metaphysical quandriesseen through the suffer- "
ing heart, the comedy of suffering as the contract we live by and
try to evade. It is the heritage of Jewish writers to 'deal with
suffering, especially suffering as a result of some essential injustice
in the human or divine world, suffering to which they offer a
response of compassion and of yearning, for a life modeled on
human kindness. Identifying with the oppressed, the Jewish
voice-in a passionate, non-modernist tone-argues 'in defense;
humor or pathos or both come out of the ironic tension between
human beings expressing kindness, dignity, hope, and a world
expressing injustice.
Perhaps, as I believe, this heritage has its roots in preDiaspora Judaism-in the prophetic (as opposed to the priestly)
tradition within the Old Testament-the tradition of Isaiah and
Amos, holding up righteousness against ritual.
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land
to an end,
saying, "When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain?
And the sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale ... ?", (Amos, 8)
The prophetic voice in the Second ~saiah condemns an empty
ritualism:
' ,
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress
all your workers ... , Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the
Lord?
This becomes one pole of a dialectic that was to express itself l~
the eighteenth century as Chassidic Judaism as opposed to the
traditional rabbinate, a dialectic that continues to this day.
Or perhaps radical Jews in the twentieth centu~y have "~n­
vented" this past for ourselves, given ourselves thiS prophetiC,
passionately moral tradition by emphasizing it out of its original
,
,tWe
RESPONSE
proportion. Perhaps the qualities in Judaism I am speaking of,
qualities that underlie the work of Paley and Olsen, are only part of
recent Jewish experience-the experience of late-nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European and immigrant radical Jews. 6 According to this view, we project an idealized picture of immigrant
radical Jewish culture backward onto Jewish history.
I am not sure-but I know that this heritage does underlie the
writing of both Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen and that it comes to
them through immigrant radical Jewish culture. For regardless of
Louis Feuer's revision of history,7 immigrant Jewish culture was
largely radical-anarchist, socialist, communist, Zionist, or some
amalgam of these with faith in the labor movement (see Elazer,
Howe, Ruchames, Chametzky, Rischin, etc.).8 Not that there was
a strong, unified, Jewish socialist movement-but that there were,
beneath the struggle to survive and cynicism over the possibility of
social change, idealistic longings for and fervent discussion about a
just society, classless, unoppressive: a brotherhood.
In the writing of Olsen and Paley this heritage serves as a
major source of value. Images from the culture become touchstones in their writing. Now, for Saul Bellow, too, immigrant life is
drawn upon fo~ images of value; but what is that value?-the
dignity of the individual in the midst of forces that try to reduce his
life. Among radical Jewish writers, on the other hand, what is
sought in immigrant culture is identification with sufferers of
injustice and oppression, and identification with resistance against
. their su:tIeri~g.
"Sure, I'm a Jewish writer," Grace Paley says.9 In "Faith in a
Tree," she specifically connects Jewish tradition to a humanist
vision: "If it's truth and honor you want to refine, I think the Jews
have some insight. Make no images, imitate no God .... Let man,
who was full of forgiveness at Jerusalem, and full of survival at
Troy, let man be in charge of Good."
In "The Immigrant Story," Paley contrasts a narrator who
grew up "in the summer sunlight of upward mobility" to Jack, who
was "wiped out of [his] profession during the McCarthy inquisi'tions." She is now the more "radical," but Paley shows Jack as
one whose radical politics seeped into his blood from the time he
was born-born to Jewish immigrants who lost three sons to
PALEY AND OLSEN: RADICALJEWISIi HUMANIsTS .
famine. The essay "Mom" turns to the first generation of American Jews as the source of socialist ideals and human decency. The
recurrent father in her stories, also a socialist; always appears~s:a
source of value. Paley has said that in her own life bothherinother
and father were very political people. Her father had been in prisori
in Siberia, her mother in exile. In 1905 the czar announced a
general pardon; they married and came to the United States.' In this
country they were so concerned with developing a career .and
providing for a family that they largely ignored politics. But by the
time Grace was born, this period was over, and her life with them
was drenched in idealism and politics. IO
The old woman in Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle" is also a .
product of revolutionary Russia, of socialist idealism .worn down
not in prison but in the struggle to feed her family in the United
States. Unlike Paley's real mother, Olsen's. old woman never acts
politically once she has immigrated. She is denied even readirig
circles, denied by circumstances and her husband, and it is only
buried deep within her heart that her idealism lives, to come to
expression near her death. This old woman. is not Olsen's own
mother; her experience is that of other members of Olsen's family.
Tillie Olsen herself grew up in the midwest in a socialist family that
considered itself internationalist, tied to all progressive movements." But the touchstone-which produces Olsen's richest poetry-is the Jewish radical heritage of Jeannie's grandmother.
Can this heritage be passed on-can radical Jewish humanism
be transmitted, in the absence of active religious participation,
from generation to generation?
According to both Paley and Olsen, it can. In "Mom," Paley
writes:
I have told [my children] to be kind. Why? Because my mother was. I
have told them when they drop a nickel (or even a shirt) to leave i! for th~
gleaners. It says so in the Bible and I like the idea. Have I told them to
always fight for mass transportation and not depend on the auto? Well,
they know that. Like any decent kids of socialist extraction, they can spot
the oppressor smiling among the oppressed. Take joy in the struggle
against that person, that class, that fact. It's very good for the circulation;
I'm sure I said that.
"42" RESPONSE
In Olsen's fiction, too, the radical Jewish heritage is capable of
being passed on. Jeannie, Helen and Lennie's daughter, is the best
expression of this transmission. In story after story, we see her in
the process of imbibing the tradition. In "Hey Sailor, What Ship?,"
J~annie is a kind but self-centered child who is fond of Whitey, the
tadical, idealistic seaman who has degenerated into a drunk-fond,
but she runs from him. In "0 Yes" Jeannie is sufficiently aware to
recognize that her younger sister Carol is going through the ugly
process of cultural "sorting" (black from white, poor from rich)
that she herself has gone through. Her anger comes from her
frustration with injustice that has impoverished her life as it is now
impoverishing her sister's, and she bursts out in fury to her mother
about the way the system of education "sorts." In "Tell Me a
Riddle," the final story in the collection, Jeannie has become a
loving, caring nurse. The old man, pitying his wife, prays for her
death yet fears "to let her die, and with her their youth of belief out
of which her bright, betrayed words foamed." Jeannie, representing that youth of belief, is the living evidence that something
remains. "Like Lisa, she is, your Jeannie," the old woman says to
Lennie and Helen. Lisa, hanged· in prison for killing their group's
betrayer, was a teacher. "To her, life was holy, knowledge was
holy .... " She represents the core that the old woman once fought
for and fears lost. Lisa is not Jewish-and I think that is important.
the universality of the yearning is important. But it is breathed into
Jeannie's heart by way of Jewish immigrant radical culture. And so
the tradition is not lost-as the old woman, seeing her Americanized, materialistic children, fears it may be.
This heritage is communalist. It speaks for a community of
ordinary people who are worthwhile. Grace Paley's stance is
essentially that of the Jewish storyteller of Yiddish fiction. Her
father, both in her stories and in real life, was himself a good
storyteller-a storyteller of an old school, which takes for granted
that the audience is part of the writer's community, sharing her
values. I would argue that the voice of Paley's narrators often
implies a politics, a populist politics that seeps into the reader not
through discussions of ideology but through its insistence on
common life and ordinary language-"home language," as Paley
calls it-its rejection of standard literary syntax, its assumption of
a bond with that other ordinary person, the reader.
PALEY AND OLSEN: RADICAL JEWISH Ht,n\tANIsT~.,.43
You are one of the "Friends" in Paley's story by that Il,aine.
Paley's persona always assumes I am of her faith, thatJampart of ..
her community. " 'Faith, I'm dying.' That week lwas dying too:"~
the narrator of "Living" tells us. This turning to the reader to·
comment is unusually relaxed for modernist' fiction. It is not
unusual, of course, to speak to the reader through the voice of a
narrator who exists at some distance from the implied author.'
Paley uses this strategy in a story like "Distance," told to us . by
Mrs. Rafferty. But in the Faith stories (and others) the narrator,
while biographically distinct from Grace Paley, is a persona for the
author. She addresses us. And of course we understand.
"That week I was dying too": the characters in her 'stories
share a common world. We are not examining the psychology of an
extraordinary and alienated neurotic. Me, too, they say. Paley
once told an interviewer:
I think sometimes when people write, they don't really write about all of
life in a way. They'll write about some guy who's all fucked up, and'who
cares? We know all about these fucked up people. And to me, they're not
interesting anymore. 1 mean, people in pain are, but not people who are so
totally in their own pain that they don't notice any pain around them
at all. 12
It is our common life, our common pain, that concerns her. She
speaks about and for the women in the playground, the radical
friends who visited China, the mothers of the last generation. Faith
may get pulled from her tree by her children so that she "thoug~t
more and more and every day about the world," but Grace Paley
has always shared a world with us. In the stories of how many
modern writers do we hear of collective experience?
"Friends," the title of her deepest story, is the subject of so
much of her fiction. The vow among the friends, the narrator tells
us, was "at least as useful as the vow we'd all sworn with husbands
to whom we were no longer married." "Friends" begins, "To'put
us at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying ... " and ends,
"I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report OJ}these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments. "
In "Friends" as in all of Paley's stories, there is no separating
public and private. To emphasize this she inverts the expected:
"""44
RESPONSE
"Then Susan ... began to tell that man all our private troublesthe mistake of the World Trade Center, Westway, the decay of the
South Bronx, the rage in Williamsburg." The children who succumbed to drugs or other disasters are not expressing personal
neuroses: Faith tells her son, "Listen Tonto. Basically Abby was
O.K. She was. You don't know yet what their times can do to a
person."
Everyone matters. Salena, dying of cancer, says to her
friends, "O.K., first things first. Let's talk about important things.
How's Richard? How's Tonto? How's John? How's Chrissy?
How's Judy? How's Mickey?" Paley has said:
There are extraordinary and outstanding people . . . . I'm not even
interested in their lives .... I'm really more interested in how people live
every day .... I think most people are heroic to a degree, they're heroic in
caring for the lives of people around them and not dumping each other or
dumping on each other. 13
If she writes Jewish comedies of suffering, they are not, for
instance, like Bellow's-the comedy of the neurotic individual
tripping over his own mishegos-they are about our common
suffering and are, finally, able to celebrate our common life.
In other words, there is a difference between the experience of
our common suffering and the common experience of individual
suffering. Woody Allen's humor depends upon our recognition that
his weaknesses are like our own. He plays the ultimate bumbling,
guilt-ridden narcissist. But his suffering derives from self-torturehis love/hate affair with himself. Woody Allen is funny because he
is so totally self-involved with pain he has brought on himself. That
pain is fundamentally unlike the pain of being a parent whose child
dies or oppressed people who lack food or opportunity for satisfy. ing-work. Certainly every writer means to tap our common experience, even when writing ofa solitary. All of us have something ofa
Bartleby within us. All of us concur when Ellison's Invisible Man
declares, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak
for you?" But surely there is a difference between writers who
emphasize the ways we share experience and those who emphasize
the isolated, subjective nature of experience. Grace Paley, like
Tillie Olsen, writes about what we share.
PALEY AND OLSEN: RADICAL JEWISH ~NISTS·,
They deal with problems everyone in the commOnity o(caring ,
people face. Emily, in "I Stand Here Ironing;" has been damaged "
not by the neurotic problems of her mother but by the times she
and her mother lived through. In a story of eleven, pages we art?
offered a short course in American history-that history as it. was' .
lived in the "personal" struggles of the mother, who tells herself
the story. We suffer with her as she goes over the past, guilty for
having been unable to transcend her times. Whitey, in "Hey Sailor,
What Ship?," is a decent, sensitive man with a vision of
brotherhood; he is destroyed by the conflict betwe,en his own '
sensitive idealism and history-the destruction of the radical labor '
movement, the brutal relationships between men and, women. He
blurs his pain with alcohol. Olsen is interested in people who insist
on human ties in the face of a society that insists on division by
class, race, education, a society that emphasizes not community
but individual problems, individual success.
But is it possible to hold such a vision and not break your'
heart? Here, Paley and Olsen diverge. I think it is true to say that
Paley's fiction, while aware of tragedy, is hopeful. Olsen's,while
singing of what can be preserved from loss, suffering, and de3;th, is
tragic.
Grace Paley writes in the tradition of Jewish fiction about
people in a hand-to-mouth existence, worn down by poverty and
injustice, but surviving, maintaining dignity. What Howe says of
Yiddish writers is true also of Paley: "These writers-let us call
them the writers of sweetness-do not assume evil to be the.1ast
word about man."14 At times characters in Paley's fictIon demand
that the narrator face the tragedies of life.
.
"Tragedy! You too," Faith's father complains. "When will
you look it in the face?" As Marianne De Koven argues, Faith and
her father represent two poles of Paley's art-an art groun~ed in ~
realism not willing to deny the force of circumstances-"what their
times can do to a person" -yet delighting in the free flight of
spirit. 15 The narrative voice and the digressive, un plotted surface
express hope, insist on human possibility in the face of tragedy.
For Paley does face tragedy-but celebrates coping. DeKoveri
writes,
~,,46,
RESPONSE
The freedom implied for Paley by "enormous changes," the freedom
from inevitability or plot, is synonymous with hope; hence her larger
assertion that open-endedness' in fiction is the locus of "the open destiny
of life," to which everyone is "entitled"-a strongly political statement
(219).
This political vision is most strongly expressed by the larky freedom of the narrative voice as it painfully yet comically copes.
Imagine a story like "The Used-Boy Raisers" in a different
style. A woman's past husband-the father to her sons-and her
present husband are both in the house; they patronize her, argue
about the children, leave together. She seems the real parent to the
boys; the men, in spite of their self-importance, are inconsequential. Tillie Olsen might, by focusing on the woman's struggle to
make a home for her children, write a moving realistic story out of
this material. Grace Paley has blessed us with a wonderfully comic
piece in which the narrator, while powerless in the eyes of the
world, is anything but suffering victim. She observes these unimportant, self-important husbands who come and go. She names
them Livid and Pallid, putting her very much in comic control. It is
Faith's voice that makes the story work. There is no plot. A
conversation about religion is the only development of "conflict"
between husband and ex-husband, and their opinions are made to
seem inconsequential.
Faith identifies not with Jews of an established government,
the state of ~srael, but with Jews of the Diaspora. "I believe in the
Diaspora." Jews, she feels, are Chosen "to remain a remnant in
the basement of world affairs-no, I mean something else-a
splinter in the toe of civilizations." Faith is Jew as gadfly, as
"victim to aggravate the conscience." Yet it is the self-important
men, like the governments of the world, that seem trivial. At the
end the boys are confused about which father to kiss; in fact, it
hardly matters. The husbands share a taxi and go off, "the proud
affairs of the day ahead of them." What seems to really matter is
the sensibility of the laughing, loving narrator who buys a roast and
brings up children. I read the story as one of female joy and
triumph, a story in which the ordinary evaluations of the world are
turned on their heads.
How different the result from the equally unplotted, equally
PALEY AND OLSEN: RA~ICAL JEWISH ~~nMANIST~ .
digressive surface of Ann Beattie's stories. In Beattie's work,the
flattening out of the traditional curve of plot~onftici, 'rising .
action, climax, denouement-expresses the 'inertia of hercharac:'
ters, their lack of committed caring, of purpose. Things ,happen but .
they do not alter character; characters make choices biltthe
choices hardly matter. Finally all experiences are tinged with the
irony that they are meaningless. What saves Beattie's Work is that·
beneath the inertia and emotional flatness is desperation; beneath
the emptiness we hear a shriek. All this is traditiomtl mod(!rnist
ironic style. But in Paley's Jewish fiction experience is never
emotionally flat, never meaningless, never purposeless. Paley's
apparently casual narrative line in stories like "Faith in the Afternoon" expresses a freedom that is not simply the ,other face of
emptiness.
In Olsen, freedom is internal, a lyrical.cry; hope resides in the
beauty of a caring spirit. But her fictional world is more conventionally tragic than Paley's. If Paley sees Jews as victims "to
aggravate the conscience," as powerless materially and oilly powerful morally, Olsen's characters offer still less hope for renewal of
the world. Like Helen, who can do nothing to change things-the
social machinery of sorting, of oppression~but can only hold and
comfort her daughter, they are simply tender witnesses to a vision
of renewal. No psychiatrist, no caring teacher, no loving mother,
can undo the years of deprivation and denial that Emily, in "I
Stand Here Ironing," has undergone. No miracle will give Whitey
back his youthful strength and spirit; no enormous change at the
last minute will prevent the "sorting" by class and race in'~O
Yes."
, "
"Caring asks doing," the mother in "0 Yes" says mentally to
her child. "Caring asks doing. It is a long baptism intoth~ seas of
humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched. . . . Yet how will you sustain?" This agony is central to
Olsen's work: how to give succour, how to heal what has b~en
broken, let "all in us ... grow"? If there is no way, we'an~ left
holding our baptized hearts in our hands. For the fact is, "All that
is in her will not bloom." Spoken by her mother about Emily in '~I
Stand Here Ironing," it is the pain that runs through all of Olsen's
stories and runs underneath Silences, which speaks for all those,
especially though not solely women, who have not fully bloomed, .
PALEY AND OLSEN: RAD~CALJEWISH ~l.1MANIST~
whose lives lay buried, dormant, who only gave partial voice to
themselves-like the old woman in "Tell Me a Riddle," who near
her death bursts into a long submerged love song. Then what can
one do, given that caring asks doing but that doing seems unable to
give back the lost life-of Emily, of Whitey, of the old woman, of
the writers-especially women writers-in Silences? The answer is
twofold: (a) One does what one can-and doing so, becomes more
human. Olsen's own "doing" has been considerable. Wherever
she has taught or lectured, she has provided a bibliography of lost
voices-working-class writers, women writers. In her fiction she
has created models of caring and doing rare in modern literature-I
am thinking of Helen, Lennie, and Jeannie. It is Jeannie who
listens to her grandmother, listens to the voice that's been silent. It
is Lennie and Helen who have taught her to care and to do.
(b) "There is still enough left to live by." This line represents the
hope of the mother who narrates "I Stand Here Ironing." What is
left for her daughter? What remains "to live by" is, I believe, not
only Emily's comedy but the voice of the narrator herself, a
woman who has not been ironed flat by her hard life. The music of
Jeannie's grandmother is there at her dying. That remains. And
Jeannie remains, too. She will carryon.
These concerns, these answers, are in the Jewish literary
tradition. Agreed-it is our life as Americans, as human beings, not
Jews, that Olsen expresses. But the emphasis on what Josephine
Knopp calls mentschlekhkayt*-the ethical code requiring one to
be a mentsch, to be fully human-caring and doing for others-is
certainly at the heart of Jewish culture.
In a famous story by Peretz, "If Not Higher," a Litvak is
suspicious of the rumor that at the time of the Penitential Prayers,
the Rabbi of Nemirov is reputed to ascend to heaven. Hiding under
his bed and following him, he discovers that the rabbi disguises
himself as a peasant and chops wood for a poor, helpless old
woman, reciting his prayers as he does so. "And ever after," the
story ends, "when another disciple tells how the Rabbi of Nimirov
ascends to heaven at the time of the Penitential Prayers, the Litvak
does not laugh. He only adds quietly, 'If not higher.' " What is
higher than heaven? Human compassion. "A mitzvah [a good
*In Yiddish, humanness.
deed, performance of a commandment]," Abraham Hes<.;hel has.
said, "is where God and man meet."16 I insist on the inordinate·
number of Jews who took part in civil rights work· in the early
1960s, who were active in protest against the War in Vietnam inthe
late 1960s, who have been in the leadership of radical organizations
throughout this century. Olsen, though certainly not atraditiQnally
religious Jew, is very much in a mainstream of Jewish culture; . .
In his Introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, Irving
Howe speaks of the "moral seriousness" in Yiddish writers ..
The sense of aesthetic distance, the aristocratic savoring.of isolation,
which make for an intense concern with formal literary problems, were,
not available to the Yiddish writer. From birth, so to speCl.k, he was an
"engaged" writer. ... Art for art's sake, whether as a serious commitment or a shallow slogan, finds little nourishment in the soil of Yiddish
literature .... But then, how could any theory of pure aestheticism take
hold in a culture beset by the primary que~tions of existence and· survival?17
This literature of moral seriousness is always the expression .of
a living, human voice, and the ordinariness of the speec~ serves ~s
a measure of reality. More than any other Western language,
Yiddish is in touch with the oral tradition-because until the.midnineteenth century, Yiddish was only speech. Hebrew was the
literary language. To write in Yiddish was to choose the idiomatic,
spoken language and render from it the essence of a community. It
was to assert a speaking voice, not a detached, literary voice. It
was to find poetry in ordinary speech.
'
These impulses have found their way into the writ~en English
of both Paley and Olsen. Both represent complicated fusions of
modernist aesthetic and Jewish moral seriousness. Butboth speak
with voices derived partly from Yiddish literature and immigrant
speech; they reject conventional modernist attitudes 'toward art
and propose an alternative, humanist model that is de.eply 'iJ?
accord with central impulses in Jewish culture.
Growing up in the midst of the confluence of Yiddish, Russian,
and English, Paley uses the mixed language of immigrants or df
people who have little money and a lot of ideas-who are able to
manipulate conceptual language but whose speech is rich in daily
necessities.
'~''',JSO
RESPONSE,
In "Mom" Paley speaks about the language of grandmothers:
-that is, not a word of English. She says, He came to me from the north.
I said to him No, I want to be a teacher. He said, Of course, you should. I
said, What about children. He said, No, not necessarily children. Not so
'many, no more than two. Why should there be? I liked him. I said, All
right.
There were six. My grandmother said: You understand this story. It
means make something of yourself.
I marvel at how spoken language, which I think of as prolix,
becomes in Paley's hands an instrument for poetic concision. And
how she is able to derive both comedy and nobility from the
language of the playground:
"Mrs. Finn," I scream in order to be heard ... "What's so terrible about
fresh. EVIL is bad, WICKED is bad. ROBBING, MURDER, and PUTTING HEROIN IN YOUR BLOOD is bad."
"Blah blah," she says, deaf to passion. "Blah to you."
Tillie Olsen, too, mines common speech for its riches. The
lyricism of narrative in Silences as well as in Tell Me (J Riddle
depends on fragments, repetition of phrases, inversion of syntax,
rich idiom. It is a stylized, poetic language rich in overtones of
spoken Yiddish. In the stories especially, a cultivated crudeness:
"I stand here ironing and what you ask me moves tormented back
and forth with the iron." Even more powerful, the poetry both of
the old woman and her husband:
"Aah, Mrs. Miserable," he said, as if she could hear, "all your life
working, and now in bed you lie, servants to tend, you do not even need
to call to be tended, and still you work. Such hard work it is to die? Such
hard work?"
And the poetry of the narrator herself: "Poverty all his life, and
there was little breath left for running."
An impUlse of compassion directs the aesthetic of both writers. Olsen praises Rebecca Harding Davis for writing not in pity
but "in absolute identification with 'thwarted, wasted lives .... ' "
It is unintended description of her own work. And Paley has said:
PALEY AND OLSEN:RAPICAL
JEWISH ~1S"
See, I think art, literature, fiction, poetry, whatever iris, makes justice ill,'
the world. That's why it always has to be on the side ofthe underdog. And,
I didn't know it. I'mjust saying it after the fact.'
.
,
Perhaps Olsen, more than Paley, knew before the fact; her fiction,
seems more consciously directed at healing, though no more loving
toward life, than Paley's.
At the end of "Tell Me a Riddle" the old man se'es Jeannie's '
sketch of
the hospital bed, with her; the double bed alongside, with him; the tall
pillar feeding into her veins, and their h~nds, his and hers;c1asped,
feeding each other. And as if he had been instructed he ~ent to his bed,
lay down, holding the sketch (as if it could shield against the monstrous
shapes of loss, of betrayal, of death) and with his free hand took her hand,
into his.
'
Jeannie's sketch instructs the old man how to deal with his
suffering for his wife-his caring. Caring asks doing-he is to deal
with his pain by acting out his caring. It is certainly Olsen's image
of the function of art. The story is to the reader as Jeanp.ie's sket,ch
to the old husband: we read and learn how to care, how to do our
caring. This is, while incredibly artful fiction, as far from ""art for
art's sake" as is imaginable. The artist as Jeannie: nurse and
teacher.
Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley are both Jewish writers not
because caring and doing for other people, messianism operating
within history-history as the locus of the sacred-and a resulting
insistence on beauty in ordinary life; are the property of Jewssimply that Jewish culture has insisted on these qualities; that
Jewish culture is a deep channel through which such a spirit flows,
casting its special cultural qualities on this spirit. It is partly by way
of Jewish immigrant socialist culture that Olsen and Paley have
developed their voices. Their voices are as Jewish as :those" pf
Malamud, Singer, Ozick; to define them as outside of Jewish
tradition is to miss hearing something essential to their fiction and
to seriously impoverish that tradition.
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