Auntie Semitism at the Met

It is telling that Mr. Ellenzweig is more exorcised by the fact  Gertrude Stein somehow reminds him of the Tea Party than that she was an antisemitic Nazi collaborator.  

Wonderful article, but doesn’t anti-Semitism (even, especially? among Jews) decrease a putative genius’s stature?  Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound (of course), and Stein/Toklas disappear from my radar with such revelations.   No?

Would that it were so simple. How about Dostoevsky? Gogol?  Cicero? Seneca? As men, their antisemitism is a huge blot on their character. But as artists (of whatever genre, broadly speaking)? I’m afraid not.

Allen,
Thank you for this. As a 30 year Stein/Toklas collector, this issue has long been a difficult one to digest, particularly too since my family suffered severely in Nazi Germany. I have  recently addressed it in my blog at
gertrudeandalice.com

 Distaste is a bit pareve in my mind compared to the sentiments expressed re: proto-tea-partiers, but to each his own.

 I take your point, but as great as Dostoevsky was, he’s diminished by his AS.  Otherwise, how are we to admire philo-Semites of yore–George Eliot, et al.?

 Yes we can.

Oh, that’s the easy question. I admire them on two separate counts:  once as artists, and once as philo-semites.

Yes, but the rest of the article is about the “right” of the Fascist era. The intended association seems clear.
Incidentally, the author seems to have missed (or dismissed) that Stein was being ironic in her Hitler statement.  If he had read the rest of the interview that quote was taken from he would have seen how it is incompatible with her actual views, which are pretty basic free market stuff:

“Building a Chinese
wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and
suppression of natural activity and competition lead to
dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in
literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant
stimulation. It needs activity, new blood. To the young
people who, wanting to become writers, ask me for
advice, I always say, ‘Don’t think it isn’t possible to
be senile at 22.’ It is even very difficult to keep from
becoming senile in youth. It is hard to keep one’s self
open and receptive to stimulation. Doing what other
people tell you and being protect from this and from
that is not so good, is not stimulating. You must face
life and struggle. Satisfaction comes from overcoming
opposition and sometimes from enduring things that are
not supposed to be good for one.”

You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. 
Stein seems pretty clear in her dismissal of the German people.  She essentially says that Hitler brought peace to Germany by removing all elements of contest and struggle, before going on to say that contest and struggle are the most significant qualifications of a healthy society, and that Germans have no capacity for such things and can only obey. Anyways, here is the link.  Pretty fascinating read actually:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/specials/stein-views.html

 Etienne, when one identifies as being in any way conservative (Republican, classical liberal, skeptic, whatever) in the US, one becomes hyper sensitive to being associated with or called fascists, Nazis, racists, etc… These are code words for “we are going to stigmatize your views rather than addressing them honestly.” Hence the irritation when we see it in a publication not known for demagoguery.

Allen, most educated people know that Jew hatred was pervasive in Europe until recently. You wirte as if this was someting most of us didn’t know.

There were also many Jews who also became Jew haters in order to escape from its effects themsleves. Gertrude Stein was on of those many Jews.  A;lso many modernists like Eliot and Pound used antisemitic themes in their writign.

To my mind Stein was a vile woman who after the war she should have been tried alongside Ezra Pound for treason.

We have a long history of self-hating Jews, Jews who do not hesitate to aid our enemies and defame our people and homeland, Israel.

Peter Beinart, Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and many other names come to mind.

There is a special place in hell for traitors to their own people and family.

A balanced and reasoned view of the conservative right leaning faction of the GLBTQ community. We have them and are not immune from the seductions of the right, i.e. Log Cabin Republicans. In ny own case, as a secular Jew with no love of Nazis I had to come to terms with Romaine Brooks’ disagreeable politics. A right leaning conservative, like her lover Natalie Barney she took the wrong path during the second World War. A hero in the Great War she was totally against war and loved Italy. She felt that England and the rest of Europe betrayed Italy in WWI. and were about to do it again. She also thought Italy would not get involved–why is beyond me. Like her friend Stein-she was a royalist and not too sophisticated politically. We have to try and understand why people we might admire as artists failed as people and in their moral fiber. Pound, Chesterton, Morandi, etc. Only then can we understand what is otherwise incomprehensible.

I was disappointed in the end to the article–it feels like the writer just lost the courage of all she had written.  During the war they were not “trying and hoping to live”–they could have done that with much more certainty by leaving, as so many others did. No, they were doing something else. They were throwing their lot in with the Nazis, and I see no reason why they should be let off the hook for that any more than anyone else who chose to do that. But one point that I would like to make, that also does not reflect well on
Stein, is that her massive art collection was not left to Alice, but to a museum. Alice was allowed to have the in art in her flat but could not sell any of it, and this was why she lived decades in absolutely dire poverty,
going hungry at times according to accounts. The legal battles were about, as I recall, whether Alice was taking proper care of them to preserve them and it was decided that she wasn’t, so she lost even the right to have them during her life. But it was the fact that she couldn’t sell them, which was all Gertrude’s doing, that was crucial. Gertrude was more concerned
about her own “fame” than about what would happen to Alice if she died
before her. A more selfish, less honorable person is hard to imagine. To judge someone as a person, for crucial decisions, is not the same as to write them off as an artist.

“the same as any other pair of old Jews merely trying and hoping to live”

This  could be addressed to all the others who stood by and let the Nazi agenda progress to the exterminations  not onlyof  the Jews and gays with whom these two were identified, but with all those who were declared not desirable or who chose to speak out.

This pair were not only as bad as all the others who stood by and did nothing, but in fact were worse with  their assistance in promoting the Nazi agenda. 

Since the author brought up her capacity to hate, for whom does she reserve that “honor”?

Amazing that people here see this article as  some black propaganda for the TP movement. I never would have occurred to me. That is, Stein, Franco and Hitler are still dead. The parallels between 1930s Nazis, ie, racist, warmongering occult nationalists, and the TP, ie, Constitutional originalists, classical Liberals and mainly isolationists, doesn’t exist. People must be so worked up either attacking or defending Obama that it taints even their appreciation of a historical piece about 30s culture and politics.

People here are missing the whole point, that is, the author’s point, which is, “I have always had a sincere distaste for Jews
who leave the faith by converting to Christianity or taking on WASP
airs. It seems to me an act of cowardice.”

One imagines that the parallels between the Stein/Toklas 1930s cowardice in the service of anti democratic movements feeding off “polite” social antisemitism (as the author puts it) and today’s cowardice in the service of anti democratic, ie, Islamic, movements ie, and “polite” rancid thirdworldish leftist antisemitism, which has decreed that the Arabs are “occupied” and have a “refugee problem”, would be apparent for all. That would be the only analogy with today’s world that one could admit, even if the article is entirely devoted to writing about history.

Allen Ellenzweig wonders rhetorically, on the heels of Stein’s translations of Marshall Pétain’s speeches, why James Joyce was never recruited to translate Mussolini. In fact, James Joyce went out of his way to criticize fascism, anti-Semitism, and intolerance, as did his young protege Samuel Beckett–who was later honored for his service to the French resistance. With respect to Joyce, it is ironic that though an Irish Catholic, his writing is conspicuously and effusively more Jewish than Gertrude Stein’s! In a sense, this might have contributed to her own self-hatred: Stein, like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, came to resent Joyce for what they each perceived to have been his ability to embody the avant-garde cachet of High Modernism once Ulysses came to be recognized as the preeminent English-language novel of the era. Perhaps since Joyce was so prominently philo-Semitic, both in his writing and his personal life, Stein embraced her self-wounding, self-effacing anti-Semitism out of spite?

Nonetheless, I think the most enduring insight in this article is the recognition that though Stein never addresses her own Jewishness, nor her lesbianism, in her writing, we as readers can’t help but consider both of these facts as we evaluate her work, whether historically (significant), artistically (fascinating), or ethically (catastrophic). Part of her power as a writer, for those with the patience to struggle with her work, is her effort to deprive language of its ability to signify: language becomes a play of sounds, a play of associations, a play of rhythm, in lieu of a play of meanings–just as paint in abstract art becomes not a means toward representation, but the thing itself in the work of art, or music becomes dissociated from melody and harmony in contemporaneous works of modern music. There is no author in the English language during the first half of the 20th century who carries these experiments further or interprets the task of the writer more radically than Gertrude Stein. One can’t help but consider that NOT talking about Jewishness and NOT talking about lesbianism are an important part of Stein’s motivation as a writer. We cannot identify where these affiliations manifest themselves in her work, yet they animate every aspect of her project.

This is why Stein’s writing matters and why she should not be dismissed merely as a self-hating Jew or a paradoxically closeted (in plain sight, as Ellenzweig aptly puts it) lesbian. There are plenty of people, then and now, with deplorable politics. There are plenty of Jews who wish they were something else–just ask Henry Kissinger! There are plenty of people who make bad choices during war and other extreme circumstances. But only Gertrude Stein wrote like Gertrude Stein–and that’s the reason why we should continue to think about her and honor her achievement.

why were so many german jews so anti-semetic that they allowed this evil man to gain their supprt?  just asking….

My husband and I just saw the fantastic Stein show at the Met.  Our friend Gilbert who was with us passed a copy of Allen’s article.  It was the perfect filter for the show, and makes profound points.  I felt teary-eyed at the end of the article.