The youngest of three children, Paley was born Grace Goodside in the Bronx, New York, on 11 December 1922. Her Jewish parents, Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, had anglicized their last name from Gutseit after immigrating to the United States from the Ukraine in 1906, when both were just twenty-one years old. Her father had worked first as a photographer and then attended medical school. By the time of Paley's birth he was a practicing physician. Paley's life and work have been much influenced by those beginnings. Her biographer Judith Arcana notes that the family 's home "was a kind of way-station for people coming to the United States from Russia." Some people stayed for weeks and even months, and "Every Friday or Saturday night, there was company, mostly family; they would all sit at a big round table in the dining room, talking about events in the old country or American politics."
Born sixteen years after her brother, Victor, and fourteen years after her sister, Jeanne, Grace grew up a much-loved youngest child among a virtually all-adult family.
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