Throughout their lives together, both Stein and Toklas remained, with rare exceptions, silent on the matter of their Jewish identity. Malcolm quotes a letter that Stein’s friend and long-time correspondent Thornton Wilder wrote to Alexander Woollcott in September 1933, in which he wonders why this redoubtable figure, this “fine, big serene girl . . . beyond prejudice – beyond being touched by the world’s good or bad opinion”, omits any reference to the couple’s Jewishness in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “And why”, Wilder continues, warming to his theme, “in the bundle of pages which were all that I could endure of that 1,000 page work (‘the first great book written in the future’) The Making of Americans does she not mention that the family she is analyzing in such detail is a Jewish family. \[. . .\] It’s possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.” The absence of any overt treatment of Jewishness in Stein’s writings may, of course, suggest how far from essential the issue was to her particular aesthetic concerns. Yet her apparent indifference on this point has polarized many of her critics, particularly given the recent resurgence of interest in her (unrealized) project, undertaken in the early 1940s, to translate Marshal Pétain’s Paroles aux français for the benefit of a wider audience across the Atlantic.
Reviewing the trajectory of Stein’s writings over the years, Malcolm dryly observes that “As she grew into her role of modernist genius, the ‘Jewish question’ seems to have faded from her consciousness”. In Malcolm’s assessment, the mature Stein came to abandon those ideas she had nurtured as a young woman of the blood ties that served to unite and define the Jews as a people, ideas that owed much to late nineteenth-century theories of race in vogue at that time. In 1896, while a student at Radcliffe College, Stein wrote a college paper entitled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation”, in which she sets out her argument that abstaining from intermarriage is “the sine qua non of Judaism”. The idea of a religious mission was, for Stein, only an afterthought in the history of the Jews; the original prophecies of Israel’s greatness as a nation appealed solely to an ethical ideal, at the heart of which lay the notion of self-imposed “isolation”. The twenty-two-year-old Stein was hardly blind to the dangers of such isolation, as she cast her eye over the resurgence of old prejudices in Europe – the “spirit prevalent in Germany” and the anti-Semitic riots sparked by the Dreyfus Affair in France; yet she felt that the advantages of such self-imposed exclusion outweighed the potential dangers.
Stein’s college essay is one of the very few pieces in which she engages directly with the issue of Jewish identity, though she does return to the subject in more elliptical terms with her short text “The Reverie of the Zionist” (1920), a piece that ends with the quatrain: “I say all this to prove that Judaism should be a question of religion. / Don’t talk about race. Race is disgusting if you don’t love your country. / I don’t want to go to Zion. / This is an expression of Shem”. This “I” that is given the last word in “The Reverie of the Zionist” seems to reverse the terms of Stein’s earlier essay, with religion now trumping race. Yet even if we were to conflate the voice of this “I” with that of Stein (and nothing could be less certain), there would still be an underlying consistency between the two texts. In “The Modern Jew”, Stein had argued that feelings of patriotism and the “strong race-feeling” of Judaism are perfectly compatible because Jewish identity consists in familial, rather than national, ties: “It is the feeling of kinsfolk and does not in any sense clash with the loyalty of a man to his nation”. The more mature Stein, writing “The Reverie of the Zionist” over twenty years later, is still preoccupied with countering the old slur that, for Jews, love for one’s country (whether it be the United States or elsewhere) always comes second to clan loyalty. Zionism threatens Stein’s sense of complementary identities precisely because it seems to fuse, by way of race, familial and national loyalties.
One of the problems bedevilling our understanding of identity and politics in Stein’s work is the tendency, among many of her admirers, to yoke her aesthetic radicalism to a programme of progressivist and anti-authoritarian politics. In fact, Stein’s politics were conservative and reactionary; she was anti-Loyalist during the Spanish Civil War (much to the chagrin of Picasso), she harboured a lifelong fear of Communism, and was, like so many of her modernist contemporaries (Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats), drawn by the powerfully mythic structures of Fascism. In the introduction that was to accompany her proposed translations of Pétain’s speeches, Stein presents a symbolically and historically charged portrait of the Maréchal: a figure on a white horse embodying the fulfilment of an old French prophecy; the nation’s saviour, “who in the last war saved France by a great victory, and in this war has saved them throughout their great defeat”. Pétainism was hardly a crime at the time Stein wrote her introduction (the manuscript was sent to her American publisher in January 1942); in the light of her own political conservatism and the popular support Pétain enjoyed in the early 1940s, we don’t need to share Stein’s enthusiasm in order to understand it. What is far more difficult to comprehend, however, is Stein’s decision to continue translating Pétain’s speeches until early 1943, well after the persecution of Jews had become official state policy and mass deportations to the death camps had begun in France. The idea that Stein took on the project in order to survive cannot be dismissed altogether, but it remains highly implausible. As Stein herself makes clear in Wars I Have Seen, even in the later stages of the war she and Toklas had the means at their disposal to cross to nearby Switzerland or return to America, and yet, lulled by the air of unreality pervading their situation, they elected to stay in France rather than face the “upset” of having to uproot themselves from their country haven in the Rhône-Alpes.
After the war, it emerged that Stein and Toklas had spent the war years relatively unmolested thanks to the protection of Bernard Faÿ, whose zeal as a collaborator under Vichy led to his appointment as Director of the Bibliothèque nationale and head of the Service des sociétés secrètes (in which capacity he was responsible for the deportation and deaths of a large number of Freemasons – perhaps a thousand deportations to the camps, of which half this number died).
How much did Stein and Toklas know, or choose not to know, about Faÿ’s wartime activities? What are we to make of Stein’s claim that she knew nothing of the Gestapo raids that were taking place in neighbouring villages and, as she writes in Wars I Have Seen, that she heard “what had happened to others” only after the arrival of the American soldiers in August 1944? If these are some of the questions thrown up by Malcolm, any answers will only emerge with the discovery of new evidence – Two Lives adds nothing to the existing record in this regard. There may, as Malcolm suggests, be documents “out there”, as yet undiscovered or unpublished, which would throw a whole new light on issues such as Stein and Toklas’s Jewish identity or the more troubling aspects of their relationship with Bernard Faÿ, but for the time being this remains pure speculation.
As for the brownies, see here.
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