Articles - May 2012

In his Huffington Post piece, “Suppressing Ugly Truth for Beautiful Art” (May 1, 2012), Alan Dershowitz writes: 

Stein, a “racial” Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered. The [Metropolitan Museum of Art] exhibit says “remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact.” It adds that “Bernard Fay, a close friend … and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them.” That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened. Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason: Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.

Published under the title “Three Lives,” this letter by Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo — written in response to Natalie Robin’s article, “The Defiling of Writers,” appeared in the December 5, 1987 issue of The Nation.  You can read the complete text here in PDF format.

Stein and History

(The “Stein and History” section of Retallack’s introduction is available here in PDF format.  She wrote this headnote for the Stein dossier.)

In writing “Stein and History” — the penultimate section of my introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), I was trying to understand both Stein’s attitude toward history, something she frequently wrote about from both an American and European point of view, and her sense of what was going on during the Vichy years.

On May 6, 1934, The New York Times published an interview by Lansing Warren, entitled “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics.” The full piece is available online at the Times site.  A pdf of the article, as it appeared in the paper, in available here (useful given that the OCR version on the Times site has a few minor errors).