On the branches of the bare first draft, life begins to bud. Before, the woman seemed delusional, pathetic. Now we see her goodness, her confused optimism, her protective love for her son. The narrator’s tone turns rueful, tender; a piece of gossip has become literature. Her father isn’t convinced. He pities the woman’s sad end. But it’s not the end, the narrator says. In fact, the narrator decides on the spot to make her the receptionist at an East Village clinic, beloved by the community, and prized by the head doctor for her experience as a former addict. Her father finds this absurd. The woman will backslide: that’s reality. His daughter, he says, doesn’t understand how to craft a proper plot. He’s right. She despises plot, that “absolute line” drawn between a beginning and an end: “Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

Who were Paley’s parents that she should have ended up like this? In 1904, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had a son. To celebrate, he freed political prisoners under the age of twenty-one, among them Isaac Gutzeit, a socialist who had been sent to Siberia, and his wife, Manya Ridnyik, exiled to Germany. Two years later, they immigrated to the United States, where they changed their name to Goodside and settled in the Bronx with Isaac’s mother, called Babushka, and his younger sister, Mira. Isaac became a doctor; he learned English by reading Dickens. He and Manya had a son and a daughter right away. After a fourteen-year gap, Grace, their third child, was born in 1922, the happy accident of her parents’ middle age.

Politics ran in Paley’s blood. Her childhood was “rather typical Jewish socialist” in that she believed Judaism and socialism to be one and the same. Isaac wouldn’t go near a synagogue, so Paley accompanied Babushka to shul on the holidays. Babushka, for her part, entertained Paley by recounting the heated arguments that had taken place around her table in the old country among her four children: Isaac the Socialist, Grisha the Anarchist, Luba the Zionist, and Mira the Communist. A fifth, Rusya, had been killed at a protest as he brandished the red banner of the working class. In the way that other children are warned not to play with matches, Mira repeatedly instructed young Grace never to be the one to carry the flag at a demonstration.

At nine, Paley joined the Falcons, a Socialist youth group, where she wore a red kerchief and belted out the “Internationale”—“with the Socialist ending, not the Communist one.” (So much for the F.B.I.’s suspicions.) To her delight, she was given a small part in the group’s play, “a kind of agitprop” musical about a shopkeeper’s eviction. As soon as Manya heard that her daughter would be singing onstage, she pulled her from the show. Grace was tone deaf, she insisted, and would make a fool of herself: “Guiltless but full of shame, I never returned to the Falcons. In fact, in sheer spite I gave up my work for Socialism for at least three years.”

Writing down this memory sixty-five years later, Paley finds in it a deeper meaning. To grow up the American child of Russian Jewish immigrants in the twenties and thirties was to live in a world of constant noise pierced by bewildering silences. Politics were debated with neighbors and friends, yet the private history of suffering went largely unspoken. Paley understood that her family had known hatred and violence in Europe, “that godforsaken place,” which she connected to the American racism she was learning about in the Falcons. Yet “despite its adherence to capitalism, prejudice, and lynching, my father said we were lucky to be here in this America.”

As a child, Paley found such contradictions perplexing. The same parents who had endured exile for their beliefs reacted with fury when she was suspended from school for signing an antiwar pledge. Socialism in America could wait, they felt; their daughter’s education could not. As an adult, Paley saw that heroic Isaac and Manya were also “a couple of ghetto Jews struggling with hard work and intensive education up the famous American ladder” until they reached the middle class. “At that comfortable rung (probably upholstered), embarrassed panic would be the response to possible exposure.” Hence Manya’s refusal to allow her to sing—or so Paley, at seventy-two, tells her eighty-six-year-old sister, who rejects her theory. Forget all the class analysis, her sister says. Manya had perfect pitch; it was torture for her to hear a wrong note. And so Paley’s account of her earliest years ends with two old ladies trying to make out the blur of their young mother, as powerfully enigmatic as ever.

Paley dropped out of high school at sixteen. She took classes at Hunter and at City College but never got a degree. (She also studied poetry at the New School with W. H. Auden, who did her the great service of encouraging her to write in her own voice.) At nineteen, she married Jess Paley, a soldier, and went to live with him at Army bases in the South and the Midwest before moving to a basement apartment on West Eleventh Street to wait out the war, supporting herself with a string of secretarial jobs.

Mainly, though, she worked as a housewife. “That is the poorest paying job a woman can hold,” Paley wrote later. “But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it.” Nora was born in 1949, followed, two years later, by a son, Danny. Motherhood elated and sustained Paley; as she got older, she spoke of children with an almost mystical appreciation. (“The child, you know, is the reason for life” is a typical Paleyism.) She was also overburdened, exhausted, and lonely. Jess was struggling with the transition to civilian life. (They separated in 1967, but stayed friends.) There was very little money. Paley had dreamed of having five or six kids, but when she learned that she was pregnant for a third time she went to West End Avenue for an abortion. Soon she was pregnant again, with a child that she wanted and Jess didn’t. She was agonizing over what to do when she suffered a miscarriage.

By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the accumulation of these experiences was “creating a real physical pressure” in Paley’s chest. “I was beginning to suffer the storyteller’s pain: Listen! I have to tell you something!” Her chance was a bout of sickness serious enough to keep Nora and Danny at an after-school program until dinnertime for several weeks. Freed from interruption, Paley wrote until she had her first story.

It’s called “Goodbye and Good Luck,” and it’s a triumph. Here’s how it begins: “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years.” No throat-clearing preamble, no careful, self-conscious framing of the kind that so often accompanies early work. Just a voice on the page, speaking high and proud, certain of being heard.