Irena Klepfisz

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—Im not sure if thats the right word, but I dont know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. Theyve mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because its kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression."

"I cannot end without affirming as strongly as I can my deep feelings of identification and pride in being a Jew. It was Jews who first instilled in me the meaning of oppression and its consequences. It was Jews who first taught me about socialism, class, racism and what in the fifties was called "injustice." It is from Jews that I adopted ideals that I still hold and principles that I still believe are true and must be fought for and put into practice. It was from Jews that I learned about the necessity for resistance. It was from Jews that I also learned that literature is not simply fancy words or clever metaphor, but instead is deeply, intimately connected to life, to a life that I am a part of. It is really almost impossible to compress this inheritance into a single paragraph. But I know its depth and vitality, and I know that I have absorbed it thoroughly into my consciousness."

"One of the things that I did when I went to Poland this summer was, I insisted that there were lesbian -- because I know whats going on over there -- that I insisted that the word "lesbian" be in my bio. And it was interesting -- in Kraków, three young people came up to me, one of them in tears, just ecstatic that I had done it, and that I actually -- I had talked about it."

"I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same."

"I feel I was very lucky, though, because when I came out, which was in 1973, New York was just hopping. It was exploding. It was after Stonewall. Lesbians started getting organized. I belonged to a group of lesbian writers. There were four of us who decided to start Conditions magazine, for example, and before that we had a group called Di Vilde Chayas [the wild animals], which was a group that had Adrienne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Gloria Greenfield, and Evelyn Torton Beck, who did Nice Jewish Girls."