• Barack Obama (August 4, 1961): “Prosecutor Will Demand Death Penalty for Eichmann When Trial Reopens”

• Hillary Clinton (October 26, 1947): “U.S. Experts Studying Palestine Partition Map for Boundary Recommendations on Monday”

• Shimon Peres (August 2, 1923): “Hooligans Attack Jews in Doz Park”

• Natalie Portman (June 9, 1981): “Israeli Planes Destroy Iraq Nuclear Reactor: Furor Spreads”

• Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984): “Mondale, Hart Take Jackson to Task for His Refusal to Repudiate Support by Black Muslim Leader”

• Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933): “Warsaw Jew Killed on Way to Synagogue”

• Justin Bieber (March 1, 1994): “Clinton Administration Scrambles To Salvage Mideast Peace Process”

• Barbra Streisand (April 24, 1942): “Evacuation of All Jews from Coastal Areas in Holland Ordered by Nazis”

(Staffers)

• Liel Leibovitz (November 9, 1976): “Sartre Says Mideast Peace Can Be Achieved by Israel-Arab Dialogue”

• Matthew Fishbane (December 10, 1971): “Israel, Vatican Swapping Relics”

• Wayne Hoffman (December 8, 1970): “Israel Trying to Persuade U.S. to Use Veto Power in Security Council” (apparently this was once a novel thing)

• Margarita Korol (April 21, 1986): “Tension, Violence Mount in Gaza Strip”

• Abigail Miller (December 20, 1983): “Israeli Forces Continue to Pound PLO Forces in Lebanon”

• Alana Newhouse (February 26, 1976): “Manifesto Calls for Co-Existence Between Israel, Palestinian State”

• Gabriel Sanders (December 21, 1972): “Kahane Gets Israeli Citizenship”

• Len Small (August 28, 1972): “Foreigners Blamed for Rise in Israel Drug Use”

• Marc Tracy (January 3, 1985): “U.S. Sephardic Jews Urged to Revive Their Tradition Before They Assimilate”

Jewish News Archive [JTA]
Earlier: These Were the Weeks that Were

But the skeleton key may be an affair that Beauvoir had with the scabrous, hardscrabble Nelson Algren, a Jewish novelist of the Chicago school. Beauvoir called herself Algren’s “wife,” a word she never used with Sartre; he gave her a ring. She signed one typical letter: “Good night, my beloved one, my friend, husband and lover. We were so happy, we shall be so happy. I love you so much, my local youth, my crocodile, my own, Nelson.” (In their private language of pet names, Beauvoir was the French frog to Algren’s toothy, toothsome crocodile.) This isn’t the voice we expect from the strong-willed, brilliant feminist, ninth woman ever to pass France’s grueling postgraduate agrégation (in 1929, the top result was Sartre’s, the second Beauvoir’s). But the compulsively prolific Beauvoir wrote over 300 letters to Algren in this tone.

The two met in Chicago in 1946 when Beauvoir was on a lecture tour of the United States with Sartre (The New Yorker gushed about France’s “No. 2 Existentialist”—Sartre being No. 1). Algren recounts:

The phone rang … a heavily accented French voice was saying that her name was, ah, ah, something. I didn’t quite catch it. I said, “Where are you at, I’ll come down.” “Leetle Café,” she told me, in “Palmer House.” … When I got down there all I saw was ‘Le Petite Café [sic].’ She wasn’t taking any chances on my understanding French it looked like.

Algren showed Beauvoir what he imagined to be the sights: “the electric chair, the psychiatric wards … cheap burlesques, a police line-up.” Beauvoir, an unreliable autobiographer but a remarkably candid interview subject, told her biographer Deirdre Bair that she had her first orgasm with Algren at the age of 39.

Being apart was difficult. He coped by gambling, she by drinking. They arranged to meet again, whenever they could; they traveled through Latin America and the Southwest together. Beauvoir’s Catholic family’s attitude toward Jews was less than charitable. She wrote of her parents that “My father was as convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus as my mother was of the existence of God” (that is, completely). But while there is anti-Christian polemic in The Second Sex (she makes much of the Church fathers voting against the indignity of having a God born of woman), her treatment of Jews is slight but fair.

More than Algren’s Jewishness, it is his machismo that startles. A bit of cognitive dissonance sets in when one learns that The Second Sex was written while Beauvoir was romantically involved with a man whose calling card was his working-class virility, his easy assumptions of male superiority. But it was Algren to whom Beauvoir broached the idea of writing on women, and it was Algren who encouraged her to expand her essays on women into a book. The year 1949 saw the publication of both The Second Sex and Algren’s most famous novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, which was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak.

The feminist tradition since Wollstonecraft has been led by women to whom men acted less than reliably. Beauvoir is no exception. Her grandfather bankrupted the family, her father didn’t trouble himself to find work, and Paul Johnson’s characterization of the formidable Beauvoir as “Sartre’s slave” is not inapt. Beauvoir cooked, cleaned, and sewed for Sartre. She looked after his money and edited his work; sometimes she wrote it. Before his reputation was established, the yellow-toothed writer had trouble attracting women and turned to Beauvoir to procure lycée students for his Saint-Germain-des-Prés seraglio (an arrangement that led to her teaching license being revoked under charges of abducting a minor).

But Algren, whatever tough-guy image he cultivated, was a loyal and estimable man, and he seems to have held out hope, at least for a while, that Beauvoir would leave Sartre to be with him in Chicago. Though his correspondence to her remains unpublished, we can guess from Beauvoir’s responses that it was solicitous, loving, and boastfully risqué. By that point—though Beauvoir had been with the domineering Sartre for 17 years and French women had gained the vote only two years earlier—she still claimed that she had no sense of inequality between the sexes and perceived it only as she began her research. The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella surmises that “the crucial research took place in Nelson Algren’s bed.”

Algren’s Jewish background is itself interesting. He describes his mother’s family as “West Side [Chicago] German Jews who knocked themselves out to repudiate their Judaism immediately.” His paternal grandfather and namesake was a Swede named Nels Ahlgren who came to America at the age of 18, just before the Civil War, having plucked out of thin air the idea that he was Jewish. He changed his name to Isaac Ben Abraham and adopted an idiosyncratic, literal-minded faith that appears to have been sincere and that lasted for decades.

Algren’s grandfather’s Zionist fervor prompted him to move the family to San Francisco, where in two or three years he saved enough money to move the family to Israel. In Israel he made a thorough nuisance of himself, being more knowledgeable than the scholars and holier than the rabbis, and left the business of earning money to his wife. Eventually his wife had enough and arranged for the family to return to America. But the money that the American Consulate gave her had pictures of presidents on it. If man is made in the image of God, reasoned Isaac Ben Abraham, and we are forbidden from making graven images of God, then by the transitive property, there are forbidden graven images of God on the bills. He flung the passage money overboard, pauperizing his family.

Beauvoir wrote voluminously about her relationship with Algren, both nonfiction (America Day by Day) and barely disguised fiction (The Mandarins, the novel which won her the Prix Goncourt, has a character based on Algren and is dedicated to his real-life inspiration). After five years, the Beauvoir-Algren relationship, mostly conducted through the mail, began to fray. He subjected her to his dark moods and his jealousies; she wrote a strange and possibly not unrelated defense of the Marquis de Sade. She had exploded on the international scene; his literary reputation seemed to be waning. By the time the third volume of her autobiography was published, with a full description of the affair, Algren’s feelings had soured and he was enraged. “She’s fantasizing a relationship in the manner of a middle-aged spinster,” he said. “Will she ever quit talking?”

However foundational The Second Sex is, Beauvoir’s reputation is far from secure. These days she is routinely called “masculinist” and sexist. When her Letters to Sartre came out, with its revelations about Beauvoir’s luring philosophy students to the lecherous Sartre, she was called a pimp and a lesbian (Beauvoir sometimes participated in the sessions). Further, the book has not aged well: Existentialism is extinct as a school of philosophy, and modern women find Freudian descriptions of the terror struck in the hearts of menstruating girls trite and untrue. The imperious thesis—”On ne naît pas femme, on le devient;” “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”—parallels the first line of Rousseau’s Social Contract; today it has been raised as a banner of transgenderism by Judith Butler and other feminist scholars. I would love to know if Beauvoir would see this as distortion or logical extension.

What is almost guaranteed is that if Beauvoir lived today, in the wake of The Second Sex, her personal life would be very different. In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut described in a poem “the world-class novelist Nelson Algren, /onetime lover of Simone de Beauvoir.” Algren surely didn’t expect, however the dust settled, to be referenced in an ancillary way to his “Frog wife,” but then Beauvoir probably would have had mixed feelings about being remembered as “Sartre’s girlfriend.” Beauvoir survived Sartre by six years; she had her final say in Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, in which she laid bare the details of Sartre’s debilitated last decade: his drool, his drunkenness, his incontinence, his loss of mind (revelations about his ineptitude as a lover came later). Sartre had secretly adopted his Algerian Jewish mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, as a daughter and bequeathed everything to her: his money, his property, and control of his literary estate. In this, Sartre was effectively spitting in the face of Beauvoir’s decades of devotion. One is not born self-refuted and disgraced, one becomes so. But whatever she tolerated from Sartre, she never forgot Algren, “the only truly passionate love in my life,” and she never took off the silver ring he had given her. In the joint grave in Montparnasse Cemetery (the first name on the headstone is Sartre’s, the second, Beauvoir’s), she is buried in it.

Margot Lurie is associate editor of Jewish Ideas Daily. She last wrote for Tablet about her grandfather, Yeshiva University’s first Sephardic student.

• The Shteyngart Shandy: Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and lemon seltzah (thanks to Bambi Shlomovich on that one).

• HTMLGIANT provides the recipe for Roth’s Gin n’ Jews (gin, orange juice, and grapefruit juice), but executive editor Jesse Oxfeld notes that his cocktail would contain liver, crushed.

• Here are Dan Klein’s “Instructions” for the Guri-tonic War: Gin, tonic and penny served in a balloon. Understand you hold a drink.

• And Dan’s Dreyfus Affair: Equal parts Champagne, Bordeux, Chartreuse, Jewish parents. Shake drink while accusing it of treachery. Let sit locked in cabinet for a decade. Unlock and serve with an olive.

• The Icy Bashevis Singer has cold slivovitz and pickled beets.

• The Eggnog Ferber is imbibed on Hanukkah, not Christmas.

• The Jonathan Saffron Foer is a Sephardic spirit, a sangria featuring Spanish wine and enticing spices.

You know what the comments are for!

Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.