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This article addresses the dialectics of identity and otherness, unity and dispersion in Grace Paley’s “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life.” The author’s systematic deconstruction of narrative conventions invites a radical challenge of all monological views of cultural identity and transmission. Judaism and feminism paradoxically converge to acknowledge the precariousness of all definitions and the fundamental hybridity of human experience. Social and cultural mythologies are derided in a colorful and strangely “deterritorialized” prose which interweaves the serious and the comic, the individual and the collective, the familiar and the unfamiliar in a celebration of life and language’s inexhaustible possibilities of renewal.