The rap on Susan Steinberg is that her work is too much trouble to pay attention to. That’s unfair. She is one of the best fiction writers in America today, argues Joshua Furst.
In a 2007 obituary for Grace Paley published in the New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that “Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness.” Lilly Rivlin’s recent documentary, “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts,” screening March 27 at the Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival, brings together a chorus of voices from friends, family and colleagues to Paley herself, to convey a powerful portrait of an artist, poet, teacher and political figure whose depictions of the everyday lives of women had, and continue to have, a deep and powerful impact.
Eccentric and sure-footed Jewesses populate some of the non-fiction films at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, which runs through January 27 in New York City. This group includes two pretty young women who choose to leave behind the ultra-Orthodox communities of their youth, a documentarian who chronicles her dating life, a grieving mother who battles to cremate her daughter in Israel, the plucky writer and activist Grace Paley and Israeli teens who talk politics with their Palestinian and Arab-Israeli counterparts. Here are the films in which these women appear:
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree
Tearful laughter, raunchy story telling, and punchy witticisms are not the typical ingredients one expects to find in a tribute to a late literary legend. Then again, Grace Paley and ‘typical’ never met.
Writer Grace Paley died yesterday. A New York Times obit says that, “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” Paley was 84.