“Everybody can persecute anybody”

Chapter 6 discusses the interpenetration of Stein’s experience as a Jew in Vichy France with the non-Jewish experiences of war and persecution in Europe. In the 1930s, Stein happily deemed the modern era Jewish; by the 1940s, she condemns the current wave of antisemitism as a hateful archaism. In her memoir, Wars I Have Seen, Stein writes as openly about the Jewish question as she had in her college essay a half-century earlier. She criticizes Pétain, Vichy’s head of state, for persecuting Jews, paints Hitler as a monster, and strives to understand the forces that brought such figures to prominence. Though purportedly protected, she recounts being threatened with internment in a concentration camp. Continuing from her earlier wartime novel Mrs. Reynolds, Stein, in the memoir, worries over situations of persecution, imprisonment (recalling Dreyfus), deportation, refugeeism, and resistance, as they afflict the Jews and non-Jews of her acquaintance. At a time when Vichy decrees were sharply demarcating Jewish and French identities, she rebelliously suggests that the persecution to which Jews historically were subject now has become general. By Judaizing the experience of occupation, Stein affirms the specificities of Jewish experiences while imagining the symbolic import of such experiences for gentiles.

Pariah Modernism

Chapter 4 considers the solely-metaphorical presence of Jews in the final text of The Making of Americans. Paralleling the evolution found in Stein’s notebooks, the novel’s narrator largely abandons storytelling in lieu of character study. Stein replaces the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon character types from the notebooks with a purely behavioral nomenclature and, as a result, the published volume contains no explicit references to Jews. The narrator nonetheless maintains a focus on a categorically Jewish and modern type: the pariah. He introduces several pariah figures, from servant girls and parvenus to avant-garde writers, who join him in a fraternity of what he calls “Brother Singulars.” With an eye to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the modern Jewish visionary or “conscious pariah,” the chapter argues that Stein’s narrator, with the characterological “plot” he is writing for himself and strangers, estranges narration by increasingly abstracting his characterology with indefinite pronouns as the novel progresses. Amidst the formal experimentation of ever-increasing repetition and abstraction, the narrator’s Jewish pariahs recede into textual indistinguishability while still differentiating themselves from others. Through this association, Stein sets the agenda for ethical authorship in the modern era.

An Israel of the Imagination

Chapter 1 traces Stein’s writing about empirical and abstract Jewish racialism. It looks at her 1896 essay on intermarriage and the preservation of modern Jewish identity, titled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation.” Stein wrote the work at Harvard when she was both a Jewish racialist and an undergraduate scientist. Like many of her generation, Stein took inspiration from Arnold’s critical yet glorified depiction of a Jewish force shaping civilization and the psyche. In his book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold had, in part, developed his ideas from racialist thinkers who often saw intellectual and creative “excesses,” such as genius or virtuosity, as signs of a Jewish mental disease. The infamous Otto Weininger would follow Arnold in this vein. Dissenters to this position included William James, who taught Stein at Harvard. Stein’s participation in Arnoldian and racialist debates over culture and “the Jewish question” resulted in her ethical and aesthetic interest in the experimental practices that would come to characterize literary modernism.

Conclusion

The conclusion explores the ways that Stein’s identity as a Jewish and modernist writer was a potent symbol of collaboration and resistance in Vichy France and today. The chapter addresses and historicizes concerns over Stein’s Jewish identity and alleged Nazi-collaboration as raised by Alan Dershowitz and others in the popular press in 2012, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened the exhibition, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde.” Although Stein had translated the speeches of Pétain, Vichy’s head of state, her translations were never published and the origins and conclusion of the project remain unknown. In any case, the translation project must be considered alongside Stein’s numerous contributions to publications of the intellectual resistance. Popular claims of Stein’s Nazi collaboration are largely unsubstantiated, historically obtuse, and prone to reading Stein out-of-context, such as a widely-cited passage about being “conservative” in her 1939 memoir Paris France. In their determination to know about Stein’s wartime experiences and writings, the popular media have, nonetheless, affirmed the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Stein’s legacy as a writer. This book affirms that too.

“Can a Jew be wild”

In the fourteen years between the completion and publication of The Making of Americans, Stein found a new voice writing poetry, portraits, and plays. Chapter 5 considers the startling proliferation of explicitly Jewish motifs in Stein’s formally revolutionary compositions of the 1910s and 1920s. In these seemingly ahistorical non-referential writings, Stein’s Jew remains a figure of convention and difference that demonstrates the paradoxical fixity and indeterminacy of modernist poetics. Stein’s Jewish lexicon expresses bourgeois family relations (especially marriage), the singularity of Jewish tradition, and, in the aftermath of World War I, international relations concerning the proper nouns “Zionist” and “Palestine.” The chapter looks closely at the poems “A Sonatina Followed by Another,” “Look at Us,” “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled” (which appeared in Vanity Fair in 1917), “A Radical Expert,” “Coal and Wood,” and “The Revery of the Zionist.” Beginning in the decade preceding Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses and continuing through the 1920s, Stein’s references to Jews in her experimental poetry radically change the story of the Jew in modernism by uniting the historical with the quotidian, the cultural with the racial, and the personal with the political.

“So much like a yid”

In contrast to the coded nomenclatures for modern Jewish identity in Stein’s first fictions, there is an explicit discussion of Jewish nature in the dozens of notebooks Stein filled when she resumed writing The Making of Americans. Chapter 3 examines Stein’s early training in philosophy, psychology, and medicine to excavate an ambiguously racial conception of Jewish nature in these unpublished notebooks. Arnold’s typology remains foundational for Stein between 1906 and 1911, when she writes the stories of Three Lives and also begins to codify characteristic behaviors of Jewish and Anglo-Saxon types of people in her notebooks. Amidst a menagerie of friends, family, artists, scientists, and literary and historical figures, Stein ranks herself as a Jewish type alongside Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, Flaubert, Darwin, and Caliban. Rather than keeping the world at arm’s length and theorizing about it, Stein considered that these Jewish types shared an engagement with experience—a kind of disinterested empiricism—that she thought was the key to a modern aesthetics, what she called the ability to “unconventionalize.” In this characterization, the notebooks reveal Stein’s matter-of-fact association of Jewish nature with modernism.

Brother Singulars

Chapter 2 explores Stein’s use of Arnold’s Hebraism in her first fictions to signal the Jewish morality of her middle-class characters. In 1903, Stein wrote the novella Q.E.D. and the brief first draft of her novel The Making of Americans. In both works, she presents ill-fated romances between ethically-Jewish and more aesthetically-inclined characters. In Q.E.D., she allusively depicts the Jewish identity of her protagonist Adele, who finds herself in a love affair with the aptly named Helen. Adele’s frequent lamentations have biblical roots in texts attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. Stein closes the novella with her characters in a romantic stalemate, but her romance fusing Arnoldian Hebraism and Hellenism as an ideal of Jewish culture had just begun. The affianced couple in the first draft of The Making of Americans espouses Stein’s Arnoldian fusion. The novel’s paterfamilial voice of Hebraism dismisses as “modern” the Hellenic inclinations towards the arts by the young heroine and her fiancé. Similar to Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce, Stein, in her revising of Arnold, imagines the modern writer, her Brother Singular, as one of a plurality of individuals whose typologically Jewish cultural ideals combine the ethical traditions of the Hebrew with the intellectually liberating creativity of the Hellene.

Introduction

Reorienting readers of modernism away from Kenner’s The Pound Era, the introduction explains how Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness underwrites our very understanding of modernism. Literary innovators and critics like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Edmund Wilson resentfully imagined modernism in the image of Stein and implicitly defined modernism as Jewish. Antisemitic Jewish abstractions were not new, however, as evinced by Matthew Arnold’s warnings against what he called modern society’s Hebraism and by racial scientists’ diagnoses of modernity’s Jewish degeneracy. The introduction documents Stein’s life and work as they unfolded against the backdrop of Arnold’s abstractions and changing ideas of Jewish identity. The diaries of Stein’s mother, Amelia (Milly) Stein, detail the Jewish practices of Stein’s childhood in Oakland, California, in the 1880s. Autobiographical and biographical sources document the Jewish thinking of Stein’s young adulthood and college days at Radcliffe and Harvard. The introduction suggests that Stein’s diverse stylistic and aesthetic responses to racial, economic, and cultural ideas about Jews in modernity form a Jewish grammar of modernism.