Born a hundred years ago next month, Grace Paley was one of the great Jewish-American women writers, part of that extraordinary generation which emerged in the 1960s and 70s, including Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag and Erica Jong.

She was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx in 1922. “I lived my childhood in a world so dense with Jews that I thought we were the great imposing majority and kindness had to be extended to the others,” she once said.

Her parents, Zenya and Manya Ridnyik Gutseit, had their name anglicised to Goodside by immigration officials. They were Ukrainian Jews who came to America in 1905.

They spoke Russian and Yiddish at home. Paley’s mother worked for a photograph retoucher, and her father, a doctor, ran his own practice below their flat.

Grace was the youngest of the three Goodside children (16 and 14 years younger than brother and sister, Victor and Jeanne, respectively). Her mother died when she was 23, after being ill with cancer for years.

She married Jesse Paley during the war when she was just 19. After the war he trained as a film cameraman and the couple had two children, Nora and Daniel. Family life was hard work, and there was little time for writing but her career started to take off in the mid-1950s.

“In 1954 or 55 I decided to write a story,” she wrote in the introduction to her Collected Stories. “I needed to speak in some inventive way about our female and male lives in those years.”

This emphasis on gender is central to her writing. She started out at a time when Jewish-American writing was dominated by men: Bellow, Malamud, Arthur Miller, the young Philip Roth. “I had been reading the current fiction, Fifties fiction, a masculine fiction,” she wrote.

“… I had been sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman, I had no choice. Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me, my portion, the beginning of big luck, though I didn’t know it.”

Another key issue is the rhythm of her writing. Like Bellow, it is full of echoes of what she later called “the street language and the home language with its Russian and Yiddish accents, a language my early characters knew well, the only language I spoke. Two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers.”

An early story, Goodbye and Good Luck, begins, “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rosie. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.”

Then there’s Paley’s Jewish humour. In Zagrowsky Tells, Zagrowsky, an old Jewish grandfather is talking about his daughter, “Cissy was nervous… The nervousness, to be truthful, ran in Mrs. Z’s family. Ran? Galloped…”

“‘Your wife is a beautiful woman,’” someone tells Zagrowsky. “‘So… would I marry a mutt?’” In her story, The Loudest Voice, a character says, “‘I’m surprised to see my neighbours making tra-la-la for Xmas.’

My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided: ‘You’re in America! … In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Xmas… Some joke, ha?’”

Her first book of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love, was published in 1959. The collection features 11 stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologised.

The book also introduces the semi-autobiographical character Faith Darwin, who appears in six later stories. In The Little Disturbances of Man, relationships between women and men are turbulent and frequently surprising. Couples often divorce.

She probes the affairs younger women pursue with older men. Paley makes no judgments about her characters; she simply invites us to observe them. With wry, sly humour and keen insight into the way we really live — as opposed to how we like to think we live — Paley’s stories provoke questions we rarely ask about relationships.

Why do men and women get married and have children when the result is a crowded house, a grouchy husband, and an overworked, desperate wife? Is adultery really so bad?

Why is it both commonplace and universally condemned?

Paley’s women want a man who will stick around, but such a man is nearly impossible to find. The men want women to be companions as well as lovers, but they don’t want wives — at least not permanently — and they certainly don’t want to be bothered by children.

In An Interest in Life, Mrs Raftery pithily sums up the situation for women when she says to Virginia, the narrator, “‘I don’t know a man living who would last you a lifetime.’”
The contrary impulses within the characters, which Paley delineates with such a light touch, are implied by the title Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life, a brilliant study of single motherhood.

Narrated by Faith, a mother of two boys, these stories— The Used-Boy Raisers and A Subject of Childhood— feature her ex-husbands and a subsequent lover, all of whom fail her in different ways.

The ex-husbands behave as if they were just additional children.

Summing up her plight, Faith says, “I have raised these kids, with one hand typing behind my back to earn a living. I have raised them all alone without a father to identify themselves with in the bathroom like all the other little boys in the playground.”

She was an unknown author and the book was not widely reviewed. But the young Philip Roth, then a critic at The New Yorker, did and wrote that she had an“understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike. Grace Paley has deep feelings, a wild imagination, and a style [of] toughness and bumpiness.”

Paley’s second book of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, was published almost 20 years later in 1974. The 17 stories feature several recurring characters from Little Disturbances of Man (especially the narrator Faith) and, again, explore issues of gender and class.

Her third collection, Later the Same Day, came out in 1985 and included one of her best-known stories, Zagrowsky Tells. Her book of Collected Stories, published in 1994, was a huge success. It won the National Book Award (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature (1995) and received the acclaim for which she had waited many years . The Times wrote:

“The rhythms of New York City pulse through her writing… she listens to literature and street language, and blends them perfectly.” Susan Sontag said she had “a voice like no one else’s: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute”.

Her last book, Just As I Thought (1998), brought together a number of essays, articles and lectures from her days as a passionate political activist and feminist. As she wrote: “Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it — the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.” Paley died of cancer in 2007. One hundred years after her birth, she should be remembered as one of the best Jewish short-story writers of her time.