Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism illuminates the idiosyncratic Jewish lexicon Gertrude Stein marshalled to associate modernism with Jewishness. Bridging modernist studies, Jewish studies, and the study of American literature, it establishes this inveterate experimenter as one of the premier Jewish modernists. Using archival research that radically changes our understanding of Stein’s oeuvre, Feinstein argues that an interest in Jewish nature was central to the many experiments in genre and style throughout Stein’s career. Although Stein explicitly discusses Jews in early scholastic writings and notebooks, she ceases to write openly about Jews in her first fictions and the epic novel The Making of Americans. Instead, melding tradition and innovation, her protagonists are figuratively Jewish and modern. Stein derived these solely metaphorical depictions of Jewish identity from Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hebraism and Hellenism, a debt never before recognized. Later, Stein returns to an explicit Jewish vocabulary in her enigmatic “voices” writings to examine marriage, diplomacy, and Zionism. Finally, in compositions written in Vichy France, where decrees were narrowly defining the parameters of French and Jewish identities, Stein rebelliously Judaizes the experience of occupation. The conclusion rebuts recent claims of Stein’s collaboration by examining her anti-Hitlerian writings and wartime contributions to journals of the intellectual resistance.