[In the following review, Randall offers a positive evaluation of Just As I Thought.]

Just As I Thought is just the way it was, for Grace Paley and for many others loosely included in her generation. Paley herself describes the book as “a collection of articles, reports, and talks representing about thirty years of political and literary activity, with a couple of occasional glances over my shoulder into disappearing family and childhood.”

Paley is the quintessential storyteller. Her short stories have deepened our understanding of what it is like to grow up in a Jewish socialist immigrant family in the Bronx, seek justice as naturally as breath, and stand on all the rebel front lines of our time. Just As I Thought is their connective tissue: poems, articles, talks given at pivotal junctures, introductions to books published or not. Paley reminisces about the father who spent time in one of the Czar’s prisons, young neighborhood mothers, the cops sent to contain her, jobs she has held, the old Women’s House of Detention, bringing POWs home from Vietnam in 1969, tea at the home of a Russian dissident, the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment, life in Vermont and wise appreciation for writers such as Christa Wolf, Isaac Babel, Donald Barthelme, Barbara Deming and Kay Boyle.

In her introduction, and with her signature ability to cut to the chase, Paley sets her tone:

I haven’t unsettled my views of the American war in Vietnam, war in general, racism in particular, and as time increases its speed, I am more of a feminist than ever.

… [C]ertain national and international events decided the work and friendships of my daily life. … Of course I didn’t realize it at the time. It just seemed like more bad news. (p. xi)

Most of the pieces in the book, she tells us, were written because she was a part of an American movement that rose out of the civil rights struggles of the fifties, carried over into the anti-war and other direct-action movements of the sixties, and returned more boldly in the seventies and eighties on the second wave of feminism. By the late seventies, she says, those committed to social change in this country began to recognize the connections between and among these struggles for justice, peace and a living planet. Paley sees this connection-making as important, while recording its inherent contradictions: “some feminists were sometimes racist, some African Americans were sometimes misogynist, some Jews did sometimes act as though they were in charge of suffering, and almost everybody arrived too slowly at the reality of the destruction of species, water, and air.”

The juxtaposition of events is one of Paley’s great strengths, providing continuity and a many-layered sense of history. The book’s initial section, “Beginning,” includes the extraordinary “Traveling,” in which her quiet but determined mother refuses to move to the white section of a New York-Virginia bus when it arrives in our nation’s capital. The year is 1927. Paley describes the palpable silence of others on that bus, whites as well as blacks. And her mother’s persistent refusal.

From this scene, she moves to another, fifteen years later. It is the summer of 1943 and now she is the one riding the bus, from New York to Miami Beach. Segregation is still the law of the South, and she is sitting in the last white row. No one will give up their seats to a black mother and large sleeping baby. She tries, but the black mother refuses. Finally she takes the baby, cradling him against her body. A white man declares loudly: “Lady, I wouldn’t of touched that thing with a meat hook.” Paley stares into his eyes. The black mother, frightened, places her hand on her child’s head, protecting. Paley is unable to look into her eyes. At the end of the piece, she is with her sister, remembering the story about their mother and adding her own.

Paley admits to growing up with a certain vanity about being Jewish. In “Like All the Other Nations,” she remembers an event she describes as among the most striking of her life. Back when her family’s kitchen table was just below eye level, her mother turned to her father and said: “Zenya, it’s coming again.” From that memory she moves to the biblical story in which Samuel goes to speak to God and tells him his people want a king. God tries to convince him they will be miserable, but he insists. But the people too insist; they “want to be like all the other nations and have a king.” Paley thinks of those lines again and again: “We want to be like all the other nations and have a king.” And she adds: “and have great armies … and have nuclear bombs.”

Then she moves again, seamlessly, into a story about Israel. She is visiting a kibbutz settled by South African Jews. An old-timer—his daughters working, his son in the army—tells her: “I think we should talk to the PLO, and I really think we should get out of the territories.” He says he would not have said such a thing a few years earlier, but doesn’t like what’s happening to his son. Paley argues that they are in danger, that perhaps “the Diaspora is a kind of backup world for Jews.” The man looks at her and says: “Ah, but who said that the Jews have to continue?” She is stunned, and insists “We have to.” Two years later, in “Like All the Other Nations,” she wonders, “Yes, but how. …”

Just As I Thought’s second section, “Continuing,” contains some of the book’s strongest pieces. Paley writes about what she defiantly calls the American War in Vietnam and her mid-seventies experience in the Soviet Union. She visited North Vietnam in 1969 as part of a seven-person delegation from the US Peace Movement. “We had not come to sightsee, but we did see the terrible topography of war from Hanoi to the Ben Hai River …” She offers effective statistical poetry (“a village of 1,654 households / 1,007 air attacks”), describes bringing an American pilot home and speaking on the phone with the parents of another who cannot be found, a woman prisoner in the tiger cages, a meeting with Pham Van Dong: conversations transcribed hurriedly “in order to get the verbs and nouns right.”

In the sixties and seventies, peace workers and other progressive people saw their share of international conferences and forums. “Conversations in Moscow” details Paley’s experience as a delegate from the War Resisters League to the World Peace Congress in Moscow. She renders the complicated Congress politics in ways that evoke the struggles of the times, yet remain useful. Particularly moving is her description of time spent outside this Congress with a group of Russian dissidents, among them Andrei Sakharov. In the dissident’s home, they talk over tea and sweets, rebels from the United States and the then Soviet Union discussing politics, memory, language and the information that is available to them or not.

“More” is the section that brings the war home. Paley relives a variety of home turf struggles, from those waged against nuclear plants in the mid- and late seventies, through the 1979 Women and Life on Earth Conference, the Women’s Peace Camps and the era of Central American wars. “A Few Reflections on Teaching and Writing,” “Later” and “Postscript” pull together themes as diverse as the Gulf War, Paley’s approach to teaching, living in Vermont and the Bread and Puppet Theater, upstaging time as one grows older, her father at 85 and then again at 89. None of these pieces is separate, but all can stand alone.

Just As I Thought is the best sixties/seventies/eighties memoir I have read to date. It humanizes political engagement and points out the political underbelly of human relations, in a language that does justice to the immensity of the contradictions.