The Long Distance Runner: Grace Paley [graphic graphicname="TIF00001916" orient="portrait" size="A"]

Grace Paley was born on December 11, 1922, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Manya Ridnyik Goodside and Dr. Isaac Goodside, were Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Paley's parents were socialists who had engaged in political resistance efforts against the Russian czar and had been exiled (her father to Siberia; her mother to Germany) as a result. They settled originally in lower Manhattan where they were joined by his mother and two sisters, who, along with his wife, supported Isaac Goodside while he studied medicine.

By the time Paley was born, the family was living a middle-class existence in the Bronx. Theirs was a multilingual world: Russian was spoken in the home; Yiddish was used in the neighborhood; her father's first employment-based language was Italian; and English was spoken at...