By 
By Varda Levy
The air is crisp and cool. Halloween just passed and Thanksgiving whispers its approach, yet America’s stores are decked with boughs of holly. ’Tis the season, and I am mulling over a very short story by Grace Paley, titled “The Loudest Voice.” The story has become a source of quiet assurance in the annual Christmas bash now descending upon us.
In it, a young, irrepressible Shirley Abramowitz is gifted a school-child’s dream; she is to be the voice of Jesus Christ in the school pantomime depicting the Christmas story. She is chosen for the role because of her particularly loud, clear voice.
Shirley’s world is a Jewish neighborhood sometime in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the reactions to the school’s program are mixed. There are those, such as the Rabbi’s wife, who react with disgust, but many others brag about the import of the role assigned to their child in the play. This immigrant neighborhood, already beginning to assimilate into American society, eagerly places its aspirations and dreams upon the shoulders of its offsprings. Consequently, a rabbi’s wife with strawberry blond hair, a relic of the past, is dismissed when attempting to undermine these kids’ chance for theatrical glory.
The dichotomy is crystallized in Shirley’s parents whose reactions to the play conflict. Father sees no harm; history belongs to everyone, and the performance may teach Shirley to speak up so she wouldn’t end up between the kitchen and the shop. However, Mother is indignant. She views this play, enacted in a predominantly Jewish school, as a “creeping pogrom” reminiscent of European persecutions she thought left behind. A subtle attack is launched upon Jewish heritage, while parents, so eager to see their children finally participate, finally belong, head the Ticket Committee.
Tickets they buy, and to watch the play they come, all parents, willing and not, to hear Christ’s voice narrating the events of his birth, life, and death while they are enacted upon the stage. And as one follows the progress of the play, it becomes clear that Shirley’s is not the only loud voice in the story. The voice of Christ, coupled by myriad cultural nuances, is making its entrance into a non-Christian immigrant world.
There follows a disturbing question: Who will prevail? Will a predominantly Christian society silence the cultural riches of the Jewish immigrant? Is Christ’s voice the loudest indeed?
The story’s answer is assuringly negative. Not Christ’s but Shirley’s voice is unquestionably loudest, not only for its physical magnitude, but, most importantly, for its spiritual stamina.
To begin with, the story is written in retrospect by a Shirley who narrates an incident of her youth. It is clear the adult narrator is keenly aware of the incongruity within the stage production. The chosen details of her narrative underline the comic irony of the play. One has to chuckle at Marty, Shirley’s classmate, who greets his twelve disciples “wearing his father’s prayer shawl” or at the disciples identified as “half of the boys in fourth grade.” Thus the comedy strips the performance of its potential cultural impact. In addition, the narrator’s skill in recreating the sounds and dynamics of her youth prove she is still tuned to that environment. At the story’s end, in bed for her night’s sleep, while her parents converse in the kitchen, Shirley yells in Yiddish, demanding quiet. Her father brushes her off, slamming the kitchen door. There is intense intimacy in the good natured familial banter, much like the opening confrontation with the grocer who has no patience with the gregarious child dipping her fingers in the pickle barrels.
The reader realizes that Shirley has been and still is an integral part of the world she recreates. Her narration projects a sense of origin, an awareness of Jewish rootedness. And these are the ingredients sustaining her voice, rendering it loudest. No alien intrusion can compromise this girl’s identity. She is too much at home with herself. She prevails!
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