Zagrowsky Tells by Grace Paley

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1985 (as “Telling”; collected in Later the Same Day, 1985)

Type of work: Short story

The Work

In “Zagrowsky Tells,” Paley’s recurring character Faith appears again but in a secondary and not necessarily flattering role. The focus is on Zagrowsky, a retired Jewish pharmacist, as he sits in the park with his grandson, a black child named Emanuel.

Faith, a former customer whom Zagrowsky has not seen in years, approaches him and asks him about the boy. He begins to explain how he has come to have a black grandson, and as they reminisce about their shared past in the community he confronts her for having led a protest against him for supposedly racist practices. He denies having been racist, but Faith insists that he subtly mistreated his black customers. Faith then presses him to talk about Emanuel, and he tells the story: His daughter Cissy became mentally unbalanced, suffering attacks and even protesting his racism herself; she was committed to an institution north of the city where she became pregnant by a black gardener. Now she lives at home, still nervous and dependent, and Zagrowsky and his wife raise her son, Emanuel.

Having heard his story, Faith begins to offer advice about providing for the child’s racial identity, but Zagrowsky interrupts and angrily sends her off. Now confused and frustrated, he vents his anger on another stranger, an innocent man who approaches him to praise and ask about Emanuel. Faith quickly returns with a group of her friends and saves Zagrowsky from the bothersome stranger, then they warmly say goodbye, leaving Zagrowsky alone with Emanuel and uncertain as to what exactly has transpired.

“Zagrowsky Tells” really concerns two separate stories told by Zagrowsky. One is the story of his and Emanuel’s history, a sad tale in which much of the pain and the meaning is left between the lines. Zagrowsky is a proud and bitter man who must work hard to face the difficult truths of his life: his bigotry, his failures as a father and husband, his inability to trust or communicate with others. Thus, his story is easiest told when he relies on facts.

The other story, however, is the story he tells the reader. This account, given in the immediate first-person present, weaves together the external reality of the encounters in the park with the internal monologue of Zagrowsky’s mind. As he talks to Faith and looks after Emanuel, he is constantly digressing—observing, judging, evaluating, speculating, anticipating, imagining, and above all, remembering—and it is through his observations, thoughts, and memories that a true view of his life and his personality emerges. Paley thus portrays from within the fears, anxieties, and longing of a confused and repressed old man upon whom life has played an ironic joke.

As in so many of her stories, Paley’s prevalent attitude toward her subject is one of generosity. The case against Zagrowsky is not a clear one, for his bigotry is subtle and not malicious; he elicits empathy, comparing the histories of the black and Jewish peoples, communicating his desire to act fairly and honestly, and acknowledging, in spite of the accumulated years of guilt and shame, the incontrovertibility of the past and the life-affirming value of expressing oneself. “Tell!” he says, “That opens up the congestion a little—the lungs are for breathing, not secrets.”

The ultimate redemption, however, as well as the story’s emotional power, lies not in a reasoned defense of past bigotry but in the compassionate reality of Zagrowsky’s present situation, as intimated throughout the story. Given Cissy’s illness and Mrs. Zagrowsky’s limitations, Zagrowsky has willingly become Emanuel’s primary parent, teacher, and friend. The two are constant companions, and the old man’s devotion to the boy is absolute. Thus, during the course of the story the reader develops compassion—the same compassion that in the end motivates Faith to protect Zagrowsky—by recognizing the miraculous transformation that has been achieved in the heart of a bitter old man by the presence of an innocent little black boy.

Paley’s stories may remind the reader of someone familiar. As A. S. Byatt, who has written introductions to Paley’s stories, puts it, “She reminds me . . . of my mother at her best, who told terrible stories deadpan, ironing out the awful and the banal into one string of story.” The cherished author, then, delivers her pieces from the vox populi, from the voice of mother, father, grandpa, grandma, and the next-door neighbor. The stories are told with a candor that strips all pretense—even when the speaker is pretending or posturing. The stories intrigue, even when they are important only to the common denominator of one—the speaker.

As with most of Paley’s stories, “Zagrowsky Tells” engenders immediate intimacy between speaker (narrator) and listener (or reader), even if the speaker is socially challenged, bigoted, and egocentric to a fault. Izzy Zagrowsky is all of these to a certain degree, and yet the reader must rely on him for the story. It is the tale of his mentally and emotionally challenged daughter, who gives birth to a child out of wedlock and out of their “color” range. The child, he tells readers, is an intermediate color.

The story (within the story) begins in mid-conversation, but rather than alienate the reader by withholding information, Paley’s narrator points out “that tree” and a group of women, as if speaking to a reader who is standing in that park with him—as is Faith, in close enough proximity to see whatever Zagrowsky points out. The intimacy is not lost on the reader, for Paley includes that natural beat of asides, the timbre and tenor shifts appropriate to the range of emotions that Zagrowsky expresses, and also incorporates an objective detailing of third-party accounting. These remarks, combined with the weighty narcissism and personal epiphanies displayed by the xenophobic teller, make the story work on multiple levels.

Bibliography

Cevoli, Cathy. “These Four Women Could Save Your Life.” Mademoiselle 89 (January, 1983): 104-107.

DeKoven, Marianne. “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s Tears.” Partisan Review 48, no. 2 (1981): 217-223.

Gelfant, Blanche H. “Grace Paley: Fragments for a Portrait in Collage.” New England Review 3, no. 2 (Winter, 1980): 276-293.

Harrington, Stephanie. “The Passionate Rebels.” Vogue 153 (May, 1969): 151.

Iannone, Carol. “A Dissent on Grace Paley.” Commentary 80 (August, 1985): 54-58.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Grace Paley: The Sociology of Metafiction.” In Literary Subversions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

McMurran, Kristin. “Even Admiring Peers Worry That Grace Paley Writes Too Little and Protests Too Much.” People 11 (February 26, 1979): 22-23.

Paley, Grace. “The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment.” Ms. 12 (December, 1983): 54-58.

Park, Clara Claiborne. “Faith, Grace, and Love.” The Hudson Review 38, no. 3 (Autumn, 1985): 481-488.

Scheifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheik. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

Smith, Wendy. “Grace Paley.” Publishers Weekly 227 (April 5, 1985): 71-72.

Sorkin, Adam J. “Grace Paley.” In Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Writers, edited by Daniel Walden. Vol. 28 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984.

Sorkin, Adam J. “What Are We, Animals? Grace Paley’s World of Talk and Laughter.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1982): 144-154.