Grace Paley’s Faith: The Journey Homeward, the Journey Forward

Grace Paley is steeped in traditions of community, social activism, and the struggle for transformation. A descendant of the East European Jewish socialist tradition, who developed as a writer in the tumult of the 1960s, Paley remains a political activist. Like her politics, the often-noted power and charm of her literary voice is not merely a personal idiosyncrasy but derives from extensive roots. Her Yiddish heritage blends with urban dialect and African American inflections to create a quirky expressiveness, a cross-section of the everchanging American language. These influences coalesce in the prototypical ethnic mix of New York City, the scene of a plethora of linguistic styles, an exotic territory familiarized through Paley's community of voices. The urban milieu is crucial in portraying a Jewish American community branching out and cross-pollinating with other peoples, creating a (post)modern multicultural persona. Simultaneously, Paley tests and refines Jewish American identity against the African American experience. The Black presence forces an engagement with past Jewish marginalization, calling into question a comfortable incorporation into mainstream America. American minority communities must define themselves not just against a presumed American center but against each other. Americanization as simple assimilation into a preordained culture is revealed as untenable. "The spatial topography of center and margin," Henry Louis Gates suggests, "has started to exhaust its usefulness in describing our own modernity" (189). There is no stable framework into which one fits one's cultural patterns, but an everchanging aggregation in which various communities interrogate each other in an incessant reshaping. Paley's New York is the ideal setting for a (post)modern literature: polyglot, multilingual, interethnic. As early as 1924 Mikhail Bakhtin defined modern literature as surmounting the limitations of earlier forms to create a dialogic blending. Monologism is pierced by a multiplicity of voices, an expanding variety of classes and backgrounds, so that "the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. The period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end. Languages throw light on each other" (Bakhtin 12). This view of literature as an instrument of change proves somewhat idealistic in practice. Bakhtin overlooks the elite nature of the institutions through which literature is transmitted; the spectrum of voices is inevitably filtered through an educated class. From a position not only of difference but of power, privileged authors may choose to write across class and racial boundaries; their authority and authenticity, however, is problematic. The posture of speaking for the Other has long marked Jewish speakers and writers regarding African Americans; in Andrew Lakritz's terms such representations "make risky incursions on the uncommon grounds of groups that have not been accorded the authority to speak for themselves" (4). Speaking for another often leads to representing one's own concerns, distorting or even erasing that other identity. So Michael Rogin argues that by adopting blackface guise, such Jewish figures as Al Jolson created themselves as Americans through contrast with the excluded Other. The minstrel guise "passed immigrants into Americans by differentiating them from the black Americans through whom they spoke, who were not permitted to speak for themselves" (Rogin 56). However most situations in which Jews attempt to represent or speak for African Americans are ambiguous, characterized by mixed motives and mixed results. In representing the African American presence within a larger cultural imagination, Paley, despite her obvious sympathy with Black communities, ratifies and interrogates her own Jewish American identity. As she herself explains, "if you speak for others--if you really perform that great social task . …