by Grace Paley
That night, my grandmother tells a story. She speaks the common 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.
That’s right, says an aunt, the one who was mocked for not having married, whose beauty, as far as the family was concerned, was useless, because no husband ever used it.
And another thing, she said, I just reminded myself to tell you. Darling, she said, I know you want to go to the May Day parade with your friends, but you know what? Don’t carry the flag. I want you to go. I didn’t say you don’t go. But don’t carry the flag. The one who carries the flag is sometimes killed. The police go crazy when they see that flag.
I had dreamed of going forth with a flag—the American flag on July 4, the red flag of the workers on May Day. How did the aunt know this? Because I know you inside out, she said, since you were born. Aren’t you my child, too?
The sister-mother is the one who is always encouraging. You can do this, you can get an A, you can dance, you can eat squash without vomiting, you can write a poem. But a couple of years later, when love and sex struck up their lively friendship, the sister was on the worried mother’s side, which was the sad side, because that mother would soon be dying.
One evening I hear the people in the dining room say that the mother is going to die. I remain in the coat closet, listening. She is not going to die soon, I learn. But it will happen. One of the men at the table says that I must be told. I must not be spoiled. Others disagree. They say I have to go to school and do my homework. I have to play. Besides, it will be several years.
I am not told. Thereafter I devote myself to not having received that knowledge. I see that my mother gazes sadly at me, not reproachfully, but with an anxious look, as I wander among the other mothers, leaning on their knees, writing letters, making long phone calls. She doesn’t agree with their politics, what will become of mine? Together with the aunts and grandmother she worked to make my father strong enough and educated enough so he could finally earn enough to take care of us all. She was successful. Despite this labor, time has passed. Her life is a known closed form. I understand this. Does she? This is the last secret of all. Then for several years, we are afraid of each other. I fear her death. She is afraid for my life.
* * *
Of which fifty years have passed, much to my surprise. Using up the days and nights in a lively manner, I have come to the present, daughter of mothers and mother to a couple of grown-up people. They have left home. What have I forgotten to tell? I have told them to be kind. Why? Because my mother was. I have told them when they drop a nickel (or even a shirt) to leave it for the 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. Be brave, be truthful, but do they know friendship first, competition second, as the Chinese say? I did say, Better have a trade, you must know something to be sure of when times are hard, you don’t know what the Depression was like, you’ve had it easy. I’ve told them everything that was said to me or near me. As for the rest, there is ordinary place and terrible time—aunts, grandparents, neighbors, all my pals from the job, the playground and the PTA. It is on the occasion of their one hundred thousandth bicentennial that I have recalled all those other mothers and their histories.
—1975
Like All the Other Nations
I want to read this story to you first and then I want to say a few things. This is called “A Midrash on Happiness”; I don’t think this is really a midrash, but I called it that.
* * *
What she meant by happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything she meant, first, the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man, but not necessarily (by live with, she meant for a long time, but not necessarily). Along with and not in preferential order, she required three or four best women friends to whom she could tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest, deepest, and most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject. By dumbness, she meant everything dumbness has always meant: silence and stupidity. By silence, she meant refusal to speak; by stupidity, she meant refusal to hear. For happiness, she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks, better than standing alone on the most admirable mountain or in the handsomest forest or hay-blown field (all of which were certainly splendid occupations for the wind-starved soul). More important even (though maybe less sweet because of age) than the old walks with boys she’d walked with as a girl, that nice bunch of worried left-wing boys who flew (always slightly handicapped by that idealistic wing) into a dream of paid-up mortgages with a small room for opinion and solitude in the corner of home. Oh, do you remember those fellows, Ruthy?
Remember? Well, I’m married to one.
But she had, Faith continued, democratically tried walking in the beloved city with a man, but the effort had failed since from about that age—twenty-seven or -eight—he had felt an obligation, if a young woman passed, to turn abstractedly away, in the middle of the most personal conversation, or even to say confidentially, Wasn’t she something?—or clasping his plaid shirt, at the heart’s level, Oh my God! The purpose of this: perhaps to work a nice quiet appreciation into thunderous heartbeat as he had been taught on pain of sexual death.
For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table. By work to do, she included the important work of raising children righteously up. By righteously, she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm. By harm, she meant not only personal injury to the friend the lover the co-worker the parent (the city the nation) but also the stranger; she meant particularly the stranger in all her or his difference, who, because we were strangers in Egypt, deserves special goodness for life, or at least until the end of strangeness. By bread on the table, she meant no metaphor but truly bread, as her father had ended every single meal with a hunk of bread. By hunk, she was describing one of the attributes of good bread.
Suddenly she felt she had left out a couple of things: love. Oh yes, she said, for she was talking, talking all this time, to patient Ruth, and they were walking for some reason in a neighborhood where she didn’t know the children, the pizza places, or the vegetable markets. It was early evening and she could see lovers walking along Riverside Park with their arms around one another, turning away from the sun, which now sets among the new apartment houses of New Jersey, to kiss. Oh, I forgot, she said, now that I notice, Ruthy I think I would die without love. By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. By in love, she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs’ longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years.
Oh sure, love. I think so, too, sometimes, said Ruth, willing to hear Faith out
since she had been watching the kissers, too, but I’m really not so sure. Nowadays it seems like pride, I mean overweening pride, when you look at the children and think we don’t have time to do much (by time, Ruth meant both her personal time and the planet’s time). When I read the papers and hear all this boom-boom bellicosity, the guys outdaring each other, I see we have to change it all—the world—without killing it absolutely—without killing it, that’ll be the trick the kids’ll have to figure out. Until that begins, I don’t understand happiness—what you mean by it.
Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all. So for all these conscientious and technical reasons, Faith was ashamed. It was clear that happiness could not be worthwhile, with so much conversation and so little revolutionary change. Of course, Faith said, I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.
* * *
One of the things I did want to talk about is the moment at which in one’s youth, or one’s childhood even, one develops a kind of fidelity, or one is so struck by some event that one is changed by it. I think of this particularly when we talk of the Holocaust and its meaning to us all.
We seem to forget that our people really lived before the Holocaust and that they were also in a lot of hot water even before that. And I understood this first in a way that has never left me. This happened when I was about—well, what I remember is the size of the kitchen table. The table was just below eye level for me at the time. My mother was reading the newspaper, and she turned to my father—my father’s name was Zenya (my parents were Russian Jews, like a lot of people)—she turned to my father and said, “Zenya, it’s coming again.”
Now, they had come to America in about 1905, and she said, “It’s coming again.” That’s all I remember her saying. But I must have heard lots of other conversations. Because that was in the very beginning of the thirties, maybe earlier, and what she was talking about, of course, was the coming of Hitler. And she said, “It’s coming again.”
I think Marge Piercy has a poem about sleeping with your shoes under your pillow. Well, from that time on, in the middle of an extraordinarily happy childhood in a perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood with thousands of children and a first-class family quite friendly to my interests, and despite all the goodness, that incident at the kitchen table was so powerful that when I began to write, I thought, Should I really write in English? But since I didn’t know any other language, there really was no choice.
The general feeling I had was that I might be forced to live somewhere else; and as a matter of fact, when my parents came to the United States, a lot of my mother’s friends went to Argentina, and to Palestine, and to Brazil. So they had become Spanish or Portuguese speakers and writers. It didn’t seem strange to me that I might live out my life in another country, and I think a lot of us must feel that way sometimes.
That moment at the kitchen table was one of the most striking events in my life. And who knows how I might have felt about things if that hadn’t happened, because actually my family was a rather typical Socialist Jewish family. My father refused to go anywhere near a synagogue, although he allowed me to take my grandmother on holidays. On the other hand, we were clearly and peacefully Jewish, so there we were. I don’t know in what direction my Judaism would have gone were it not for that moment.
I move from that to tell another story, or midrash, which I have talked about on various occasions. For those who grew up within that family there was, I suppose, a certain amount of feeling about being Jewish. I had a certain vanity about being Jewish. I thought it was really a great thing, and I thought this without any religious education. But I also really felt that to be Jewish was to be a socialist. I mean, that was my idea as a kid—that’s what it meant to be Jewish. I got over that at a certain point, and so did a great many of my family members who were my age. But all this brought me to the story that I think of again and again. I don’t understand why this story isn’t told more often, especially in Israel. Or maybe it should be thrown away.
The story I’m referring to is about the judge and prophet Samuel (I think it’s in Kings I). Samuel goes to speak to God and he says that the people want a king.
God says, “No no, that’s wrong, it will be terrible for them if they have a king. They’ll have this king, and they’ll have to give up their vineyards and their concubines. They’ll have a lot of trouble with this king, and they’ll lose a great deal more than they’ll gain.”
So Samuel goes back, and he talks to the people. He tells them what God has said. But the people say, “No, we already told you what we want. We want a king.”
So Samuel goes back to God and he says, “You know, they really want a king, but I think it’s partly because they don’t like me.”
And God says, “No, that’s not true; it’s me they don’t like.”
Well, Samuel goes back to the people and tells them again that they really don’t want a king. This time the people say, “Look, we want to tell you something. This is what we want. Listen: we want to be like all the other nations and have a king.”
God hears this, and He understands they really mean it. And He sends Samuel on his way to look for Saul. So that’s who they get: they get Saul.
I think of those lines again and again: “We want to be like all the other nations and have a king.” And I think: We want to be like all the other nations and have great armies; we want to be like all the other nations and have nuclear bombs. I’ve told this story to other people, and asked them, What does that mean? We want to be like all the other nations and have these things—what does that mean? They say, “Why should Jews be better?”
I keep going back again to an idea, and it’s a somewhat sentimental idea, but I’m stuck with it. And I’m entitled to be sentimental, since I’m already old, which you can tell because I’m up here. I had this idea that Jews were supposed to be better. I’m not saying they were, but they were supposed to be; and it seemed to me on my block that they often were. I don’t see any reason in being in this world actually if you can’t in some way be better, repair it somehow, and I think most of the people here feel something like that. So to be like all the other nations seems to me a waste of nationhood, a waste of statehood, a waste of energy, and a waste of life.
I want to say just two more things. First, I want to describe an experience I had in Israel about a year and a half ago. We visited a kibbutz, and we stayed a couple of nights with people there. All the members of this kibbutz were South African. They had come to this very kibbutz about thirty years ago. We found them interesting because they had come from South Africa. At one point I was talking with our hosts about what was happening in Israel, and this was a year and a half ago, not last week. Having lived on this kibbutz all these years, having raised their children there—their daughters now in the working world, their son in the army—the husband said to me, “I think we should talk to the PLO, and I really think we should get out of the territories.”
I said, “Oh?” (I’m in another person’s country, after all.)
And he said, “I never would have said anything like this two years ago, but I say it now because I don’t like what’s happening to my son and his friends. That’s the main thing. Not just that they’re in danger, but I don’t like what’s happening to them.”
Well, we spoke a little further, and I was saying to him, “You’re in danger, Israel is in great danger, and maybe the Diaspora is a kind of backup world for Jews,” and so forth. And he looked at me and he said, “Ah, but who said that the Jews have to continue?”
Well, I was hit, stunned by that remark. And I was brought back to that day in my ch
ildhood when my mother spoke to my father at the kitchen table. Although it was a totally different sentence, it was one that I would not forget. He said to me, “Who says that we have to continue?” And such an idea had never occurred to me.
So I said to this man in Israel, this Israeli, and I spoke from the Diaspora, I said, “We have to.” And now, two years later, I wonder, Yes, but how …
Now I just want to end with a short poem, which is about generations:
In my family
people who are 82 are very different
from people who are 92.
The 82-year-old people grew up
The year was 1914
This is what they knew World War I
War World War War
That’s why when they speak to the grandchild
they say poor little one
The 92-year-old people grew up
The year was 1905
They went to prison
They went into exile
They said ah soon
That’s why when they speak to the grandchild
they say first there will be revolution
then there will be revolution then once more
then the earth itself will turn and turn
and cry out Oh I have been made sick
Then you my little buds
will flower and save it.
—December 1988
II / Continuing
People, students particularly, tell me that Vietnam happened a long time ago. In the meantime, I have become old myself. Therefore it doesn’t seem as long ago as some fairly recent events.
