STRANGERS IN PARADISE.

In "Wars I Have Seen" (1945), her memoir of the Second World War, Gertrude Stein writes of the remarkable kindness of a young Frenchman named Paul Genin, the owner of a silk factory in Lyons and a country neighbor, who came to her after America entered the war and asked if she needed money. She did--the funds from America on which she and Alice B. Toklas depended no longer arrived--and he offered her a matching monthly stipend. Stein and Toklas lived on Genin's kindness for six months, after which Stein sold a Cezanne ("quite quietly to some one who came to see me") and no longer needed money. "And so I thanked Paul Genin and paid him back and he said if you ever need me just tell me, and that was that."

Stein goes on to reflect, "Life is funny that way. It always is funny that way, the ones that naturally should offer do not, and those who have no reason to offer it, do, you never know you never do know where your good-fortune is to come from."

There is another story illustrating life's funniness that Stein might have told in "Wars I Have Seen." In July, 2003, a few weeks after this magazine published an article about Stein and Toklas's experiences in wartime France, an accusatory letter appeared in its letters column. The letter cited the infamous Gestapo raid on an orphanage in the village of Izieu in which forty-four Jewish children between the ages of four and seventeen and their seven supervisors were seized and ultimately shipped to death camps. The orphanage, the correspondent wrote, was "not far from Stein and Toklas's house in Culoz," and, "in the light of this history, Stein's comment in 'Wars I Have Seen' about becoming frightened only after the American soldiers arrived and she began 'hearing what had been happening to others' is somewhat hard to believe." I spoke to the Stein scholars Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns about the troubling question this letter raised, and they suggested that I write to someone in Paris who might be able to answer it. This was Paul Genin's stepdaughter, Joan Chapman, who had been in close touch with Stein and Toklas at the time of the Izieu raid and would be apt to know what they knew or didn't know. I wrote to Joan Chapman and received this reply:

No, we had no idea that a group of Jewish children were hidden in a boarding school at Izieu, they were indeed deported, we only found out months later. I'm sure Gertrude and Alice had no idea of the incident at the time. Izieu is about 20 K from Belley and 30 K from Culoz. In those days the only way of getting to and fro was walking or on a bike, people were pretty isolated from each other. Anything confidential was never mentioned by phone.

Joan Chapman went on to tell this story:

One day about that time my mother was asked by someone who ran an orphanage for Spanish Republican children refugees, to hide the only Jewish child in her care. His name was Manfred Iudas, he was 5 years old, he was German, he only spoke Spanish! As a matter of course Gertrude came over to make his acquaintance, he was a charming, beautiful child. After a month or so my mother had grown very fond of him and she decided to adopt him. Gertrude was consulted and she said no you can't do that, he must be adopted by a Jewish family, I cannot remember quite how that was managed but it was.

The story chills the blood and more than confirms the view that Stein did not behave well in the Second World War. To propose that a Jewish child be sent to a Jewish family at a time when everywhere in France Jews were being rounded up was an act of almost inconceivable callousness. Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns agreed that Stein's advice was inexplicable and terrible. We imagined together the tragic fate of the beautiful little boy.