SOURCE: “A Perfect Marginality: Public and Private Telling in the Stories of Grace Paley,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 35-43.

In the following essay, Aarons examines the importance of personal storytelling and oral narrative in Paley's fiction, noting its relationship to Jewish literary tradition. Aarons contends that such shared stories function as a mode of self-discovery, communal solidarity, and affirmation for Paley's characters.

It was possible that I did owe something to my own family and the families of my friends. That is, to tell their stories as simply as possible, in order, you might say, to save a few lives.¹

So resolves Grace Paley’s narrator in the short story “Debts” as she—like so many of Paley’s narrators—begins to make public, to reinvent, personal history. These lines, spoken by a narrator who is also a character dramatized in the story...