Lilly Rivlin
Lilly Rivlin is a
and a secure, progressive Israel. She combined these concerns several years ago in a work narrated by Debra Winger, Can You Hear Me? Israeli and Palestinian Women Fight for Peace. (I know Lilly from Meretz USA, which she continues to serve, after taking her turn as president a few years ago.)In The Tribe (1983), she documented a reunion of 2500 members of her enormous extended family in Jerusalem, where many have lived for generations. She, herself, was born in pre-State Jerusalem. Among her many distinguished relatives is Ruby (Reuven) Rivlin, the Likud politician who is currently Speaker of the Knesset. They joust (generally in good humor) on peace issues from opposite perspectives, but he is one of the old-line Likudniks who have expressed alarm at the growing anti-democratic atmosphere in Israel.
Lilly’s latest creation is Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, an uplifting portrait of the late writer and peace activist. In a Q & A after its local debut at Lincoln Center at last month’s New York Jewish Film Festival, Lilly asked for members of the audience to share their personal remembrances of Paley. I was too shy then, but here is mine now:
When spending some time with my sister’s family in Vermont one summer in the 1980s, we saw Grace Paley eating at a restaurant we entered in Montpelier. My sister somewhat bashfully went up to tell her how much she admired her work. Paley seemed rather annoyed. But years later, something happened that surprised me.
During the 1990s, my sister, Joan Sidney (a poet and writer in her own right), became increasingly incapacitated by Multiple Sclerosis. In 2004, she published a book about her life, Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir. Lo and behold, one of the people who glowingly blurbed it on the cover was Grace Paley.
Despite the fact that I may not agree with Grace Paley’s pacifism in every instance, I was thoroughly charmed by Lilly’s movie. I think (and perhaps Paley would have even concurred) that there are times when there is little choice but to resort to arms. World War II was one such example, as was Israel’s self-defense in 1948.
Paley with students at Sarah Lawrence
I don’t doubt that most wars, if not quite all, are eminently preventable. And most conflicts, if not all, are pursued with excessive violence; even the Allies in World War II and Israel in 1948 inflicted needless suffering on masses of civilians. Furthermore, although I don’t favor disarmament in the face of Al Qaeda, I view it as obscene that our national budget remains as weighed down as it is by arms and war expenditures.
One may question if the strategy pursued by stalwart anti-war and anti-nuclear protesters of getting repeatedly arrested at demonstrations (as Paley is filmed doing) was truly effective. These actions did not really spur a mass movement. But one cannot dispute the humane purpose of Paley’s political work, nor the profound moral and existential threats to human existence that she and her colleagues were attempting to address.
Finally, although Paley was not known to be involved in groups supporting peace between Israel and its neighbors, Lilly brought out the very positive fact that she did not hide her Jewish background, and she often appeared at Jewish venues. My impression of Paley is that she could be ornery at times, but the stills and footage Lilly assembles of her at various ages, as well as the testimony of her friends and relatives, also show that she was beautiful in more ways than one.
I am reminded by Gandhi’s statement, “What you do may not matter. What matters is that you do it.”
We definitely need to stand up to any kind of bullying. I believe that it is a natural human impulse to do so and I have done that as a child and observed other children and adults protesting bad treatment of others. I have not heard a reasonable excuse for not speaking out to defend each other from unjust criticism. On occasion, I have also been chastened while accusing others unjustly and we all need that kind of reminder that we are all human and fallible.
Surely, she did wield a powerful weapon: her humor.