Between Aunt and Niece: Grace Paley and the Jewish American “Swerve”

Through a close reading of her first short story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” we argue that Grace Paley’s innovative literary style and her attention to the voices of women on the social margins are intricately related. We locate Paley’s distinctive voice within a particular linguistic and cultural history and within a particular set of family relations—that which connects a childless aunt with her niece. Family relations are an important semantic resource for conceptualizing the dynamics of literary transmission, inheritance, and influence; the description in “Goodbye and Good Luck” of a “diagonal” connection between aunt and niece provides us with the tools to trace the inherited, the transfigured, and the invented Jewish cultural legacies that energize and distinguish Paley’s work.