My review below of this moving documentary is published by EdgeBoston.com.
If you aren’t a fan of Grace Paley, you are likely to become one after seeing this film, "Grace Paley: Collected Shorts". Director Lilly Rivlin succeeds in capturing Paley’s life, one that was deeply immersed in writing, activism and community. Using old photos, archival footage, interviews and literary readings, this documentary showcases a woman who is both complex and every day, both talented and modest, and who has figured out how to embrace art, politics and love in one set of determined arms.
We learn that Grace Paley (1922-2007) was born to intellectually curious immigrant parents in the Bronx and made her final home in rural Vermont with her second husband Robert Nichols. A lifelong progressive who was arrested many times and who spoke out on the broadest range of issues, Paley was best known for her profound talent as a writer of both prose and poetry. She embodied the real complexity of modern life: she was a secular Jew who opposed the occupation of Palestine, a quintessential New Yorker whose brilliant stories resonated with that urban sensibility but who wrote poetry when she resettled in Vermont, and a feminist devoted to family.
Her short stories put her in league with the greats. Her first collection of eleven New York stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), established her as a writer to watch and her subsequent collections--Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985)--cemented her reputation among the stars of contemporary writing. Her characters spoke "Yinglish," the Yiddish/English inflections Paley grew up with, and her stories focused on the daily struggles of working class women.
A teacher at a variety of colleges, she was a mentor or colleague to many American writers. Interviewees such as Alice Walker and E. M. Esther Broner offer heartfelt testimony about Grace’s ability to combine her lifelong work in social justice with her award-winning writing. She told
her students to "Write what you don’t know about what you know," just
as she and her comrades used what they knew (knitting) to shut the
Pentagon doors with yarn during the 1980 national women’s march in Washington D.C.
She protested in outrage when Norman Mailer invited the Reagan administration’s George Schultz to speak at the 1986 P.E.N. conference. She was not the only writer to feel it was inappropriate to invite a supporter of apartheid to a gathering of an organization which identifies as the "oldest international literary and human rights organization." (Responded Mailer: "I didn’t bring the Secretary of State here to be pussy-whipped by you.")
Grace Paley’s unique combination of talent and principles endeared her to generations of activists and writers. This well-made documentary rewards its viewers with her poetry, both literal and metaphorical.
(katz asked me to post this email, so here’s the clarifying info: lisa, my wife, is a rabbi like her brother, larry. she taught at the univ of iowa while getting her ph.d. there. ‘bcc’ is beth chayim chadashim in los angeles, the first queer shul, where she’s been rabbi since 1994.)
grace paley has been a favorite of lisa's forever. she and larry met grace in 1976 in VT, next to hanover where larry was newly the rabbi at dartmouth (the first they'd ever hired). when lisa and larry saw an announcement that grace paley would be at a political meeting at someone's house, they decided to go meet her. but they hadn't read any of her work so went to the library the day before and got both of her books out. they each started one and after one story had to switch books saying 'read this! read this!' that continued for the whole evening and they have been lifelong fans ever since. lisa tells me that at the meeting, grace was a hilarious, gum-cracking personage, who halfway thru the evening jumped up and said 'i have to leave because i didn't mean to come in the first place,' and rushed out the door.
after that night, grace and larry saw each other frequently and over time became quite close. at a reading when 'leaning forward' came out she even dedicated a poem to him (probably 'I cannot keep my mind on Jerusalem.')
lisa would see grace occasionally, like in iowa city when she read and taught there (early 80s) and at a tikkun conference in nyc when we lived there (early 90s). whenever lisa’d remind her that larry was her brother, grace would always say 'i love larry edwards!' those punctuations of grace in her life are vivid in lisa's memory.
lisa always taught grace paley's work at iowa, where grace's was the first new york accented voice many students had ever read. lisa had a cassette of grace reading in her gum-cracking new york jew voice, which quite a few students just couldn't get. lisa always taught 'the loudest voice' and now reads it aloud at bcc every year at hanukkah/xmas as her drash. 'conversations with my father,' 'living' and 'debts' were other beloved stories she taught.
'later that same day' was one of the first gifts lisa gave me, about which she says 'if you hadn't liked her i don't think we'd be together now.' inside the gift book was her note, 'since you shared some of your grace with me, i thought i'd share some of mine with you.'
the last story in that book has an incredible episode between faith and her lesbian friend cassie--cassie reprimands faith for having forgotten all these years to include her. "But I mean you've just omitted me from the other stories and I was there. In the restaurant and the train, right there. Where is Cassie? Where is my life? It's been women and men, women and men, fucking, fucking. Goddamnit, where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-loving life in all this? And it's not even sensible, because we are friends, we work together, you even care about me at least as much as you do Ruthy and Louise and Ann. You let them in all the time; it's really strange, why have you left me out of everybody's life?" lisa was coming out then and it really affected her.
katz, thanks for telling us about the film in your excellent review. we look forward with great pleasure to seeing it.
Posted by: Tracy | 10 August 2010 at 15:08
This whole commentary is more interesting than my review itself - and a wonderful addition to seeing the documentary. Thanks dear Tracy for agreeing to put it up here - and thank Lisa and Larry for giving us all this most intimate glimpse into Grace's life.
Posted by: Sue Katz | 10 August 2010 at 15:45