I am drawn to the "fabrente maydlakh" the way short guys are drawn to the NBA and the singing-impaired love opera. Everything these "fiery girls" of the early labor movement represented I lack — their physical courage, their moral self-assurance, their principled recklessness.

At the turn of the century young, usually Jewish women like Clara Lemlich goaded the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers' Union and other unions into action with their fervent rhetoric and unbending will. They stood up to the owners, to the police, to Tammany Hall and, in many cases, their own communities in demanding what they felt was right. Lemlich herself was 19 when, fresh from a beating she suffered on the picket line, she galvanized the crowd at Cooper Union and inspired the garment workers to launch a general strike.

I thought of the fabrente maydlakh last week when I heard the sad news that writer Grace Paley had died, at 84. Paley was a brilliant and famously unprolific writer as well as a constant and famously untiring peace activist. In the '80s I had the good fortune to see her in both roles, first at a reading she did in Philadelphia and later at a Peace Now rally I covered on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Paley always gave the impression that as writer and activist she drew from the same well. Asked once if writers have a moral obligation, she replied, "Whatever your calling is, whether it's as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there's a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it."

So there she was on street corners, handing out pamphlets against the war in Vietnam, nuclear power, the arms race. And if her stories invariably depict people in struggles more personal than political, they nonetheless strive to do the good and right thing in the face of compromise.

The story I cherish most is one of her earliest, "The Loudest Voice," from her collection The Little Disturbances of Man (Paley also had a gift for titles). It is set in the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of her youth, where the local public school is staging a Christmas pageant. Of course most of the students are Jewish. The parents debate the propriety of the children acting out the Nativity, but Paley shows the sly ways in which the neighborhood co-opts and ultimately defangs the "December dilemma." In the end, a parent worries about the feelings of the Christian children who did not get parts in the play, as opposed to the Jewish children who did.

The schoolgirl narrator of the story also has a line that summons up the writer in her stout, white-haired old age, waving a sign at a Peace Now rally: "In that place the whole street groans: Be quiet! Be quiet! but steals from the happy chorus of my inside self not a tittle or a jot."

It's a typical Paley sentence — in other words, completely untypical in its surprising punctuation, its unexpected rhythms, its exultant turns of phrase. And it could well be the motto of the fabrente maydlakh of any generation, defying those who would insist they keep quiet, not make waves, sha shtil!

That was one lesson of Paley's life and writing. Another was this: Get engaged. Whatever you do, she suggested, do it in a way that connects you with people and the world. Her stories, especially those about her single mother alter ego Faith Darwin, depict Greenwich Village as a web of people fully engaged if not always satisfied in their lives and the lives of others, people who "thought more and more and every day about the world." Not for her the lonely, alienated antiheroes of her contemporaries, regarding their navels in splendid isolation. "People talk of alienation and so forth," she told the Associated Press in 1994. "I don't feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don't feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don't feel I'm not in it."

In her later years, Paley taught another lesson, this one about aging and acceptance. She once said the only thing she minded about getting old is realizing what you'll miss — a youngest grandchild growing up, or how a war is eventually brought to an end. "But if your health is good," she told the writer A.M. Holmes in 1998, "and you have a habit of looking at each day as a whole day — unless you drop dead at noon or something — then every day you live something interesting. It's interesting because you either meet a new tree or if you're in the city, you meet a new person. Or something happens. The sun shifts on the mountain — very beautiful things happen."

Very beautiful things happen when you read a Grace Paley short story or poem. Very beautiful things happen when you try to leave the world a little better than you found it. And she did.