Irene Levine Paull

Irene Levine Paull (April 18, 1908 – 1981) was a Jewish writer and labor activist from Minnesota, USA.

Quotes

• The time was the era shortly after the First World War when waves of post-war immigration carried to the new world like rotting bilge water all the bitter hatreds, prejudices and venoms of Tsarist Russia and Poland.
  • "The War Against the Gentiles", short story originally published in Jewish Currents (1966) included in Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear.
  • "Operation Georgia!" originally in The Worker (1948) included in Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Woe to our memory if it can be said by unhappy future generations that we defeated Hitler and Mussolini, only to lay down arms to the Hoovers, the Vandenbergs, the Wheelers, Hearsts, Knutsons, and McCormicks of America. If we allow Germany to be built up again as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, if we permit American cooperation to be transformed into American imperialism-woe to our memory if we allow the seeds of a third world war to be planted under our victorious feet!
  • "At the Gates of the Future" (c1945) included in Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

We're the People (1941)

some reprinted in Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• The ones we love are like lighted candles in our being. When one goes out, it leaves a part of us in darkness. I have a duty to perform, grappling with the darkness where once you used to be-a duty to you and to all youth like you born into a world of poverty and depression and war, a world which seems to have no present and no future. I have a monument to build to your memory...a better society where youth can blossom to its rich fulfillment. Goodbye, little sister! Thousands of crushed and broken youth lie like you in their needless graves, youth who had no present, and saw no future. But millions of us have set our teeth against the wind. The working class is moving toward a happier world where its beloved children will not be gnarled and twisted and broken, but will grow straight as the young trees straining towards the sun. ("She who Died Without Living")

• History itself is the only arbiter of "dangerous thoughts" and to whom they are dangerous. For the world does move. Men's thoughts change as the times change. You can no more freeze the thoughts of mankind than you can stop the earth from moving on its axis, than you can freeze a lovely face into eternal youth. To try to do this is not only to make a mockery of democracy, it is to stop the movement of progress and to whip up a fierce tide of reaction. Who should have the right to determine that another man's thoughts are "dangerous"? ("Jailed for her Thoughts")

• Uneasy is the head that wears a crown. ("Justice in Connor's Kingdom")

• Greed and hypocrisy are indeed inseparable companions. ("To a Young Girl Graduate")

Quotes about

• From the labor movement of the 1930s to the the civil rights, peace, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, Irene Paull conveys the richness of ethnic, working-class and oppositional cultures within the fortress of America. Her voice rings as true as it did sixty years ago.
  • Peter Rachleff used as blurb for Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Irene Paull worked against injustice all her life, and part of that work was her exquisite writing
  • Margaret Randall used as blurb for Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Irene Paull was an intensely feminine, brilliantly intelligent and morally passionate woman. The privilege of publishing her stories in Jewish Currents, and the luxury of the friendship I enjoyed with her (mostly through her remarkable letters), have been among the ornaments of my personal and professional life.
  • Morris U. Schappes used as blurb for Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Irene Paull was a great person, as these selections of her writings make clear. She had no pretensions and great honesty with herself and others. If the world is still here in a hundred years, it will be because of people like her.
  • Pete Seeger used as blurb for Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• Irene Paull is a voice of our time, of all the struggles, of the wars and depressions. Early she protested the violent, oppressed life of the Duluth harbor and the timber industry, the anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the immigrants in labor. She became a voice of the people, collecting the poems of lumberjacks.
  • Meridel Le Sueur Preface to Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)

• The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger.
  • Meridel Le Sueur Preface to Irene: Selected Writings of Irene Paull (1996)