Reviewed by Louis Greenstein
Helen Button
by Carol Roh Spaulding
Sowilo Press
Nov 2024,322 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8985431780
German political theorist and Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote that you could tell where power lies in a society by looking at the exceptions to the rule. If a Jewish writer who was living in, say, occupied France in 1941 had connections that were useful to the Nazi party or to its Vichy collaborators, that writer might have managed to avoid arrest and deportation to a concentration camp.
Gertrude Stein, the celebrated American expatriate author, may have been such an exception. She and her life partner Alice Toklas were dividing their time between an apartment in Paris and a rented home in the French countryside when the German occupation began in 1940. As out-in-the-open Jewish lesbians, they were advised to leave France before it was too late. But the women chose to wait out the occupation in their rented country home. Stein was well connected, indeed. And by then she was famous. It has been speculated that her friend Bernard Faÿ, the French historian and Vichy official, recruited her to help identify Jewish writers to be banned and Jewish books to be burned.
Did Stein’s collaboration make her an exception to the rule? Maybe, maybe not. During that period, she was known to defend Adolf Hitler whom she believed could maintain peace that would preserve French culture. But she also wrote for journals across the political spectrum. Her precise opinions were difficult to decipher. Was she discreetly helping the resistance? Was she feeding information to the Nazis? Was it a little of both?
Into the fray enters Hélène Bouton, a precocious youth who, along with her younger brother Willi had a precipitous encounter with their countryside neighbors, Stein and Toklas, and forged a long friendship with the couple. Upon meeting, Gertrude Stein dubs her “Helen Button,” the English translation of her name.
Helen Button is a minor character in Stein’s 1940 novel Paris, France. But in Carol Roh Spaulding’s ambitious, painstakingly researched, dual-narrative novel, Hélène—whose American mother is fragile, whose French father has left the family, and whose stuffy stepfather, while by no means a horror, works for the Vichy government—arrives on the page as an eighty-three year-old woman in 2005, haunted by the memory of Isaiah Langwill, a three-year-old Jewish orphan who may or may not have been sent to a concentration camp from a hiding place near Stein and Toklas’s country home. Did Stein help save the boy? Did she tip off the Germans as to where he and forty-three other Jewish children were hiding?
When the war in Europe begins, Hélène, her brother, and her mother are sent to New York to wait it out with their American family. But Hélène has a beau back in France, Milo, a bright, well-read, righteous, resistance fighter. And Hélène’s mother misses her husband. So they cast caution to the wind and return home. Thereupon, Hélène pays a visit to her old friends Gertrude and Alice and becomes their housekeeper.
Narrated by 2005 Hélène, now a pediatric hospice nurse living in Los Angeles, Helen Button asks uncomfortable yet urgent questions about complicity in horror. In Nazi Germany and in occupied France, before the death camps were built and before the war began, citizens went to work every day. Society’s institutions thrummed along. Well, not the Jewish ones. But you get the point. There were rations and curfews, but civil life went on. The courts functioned, the banking systems worked, the schools educated students, the press printed newspapers. And all the while, undesirable residents were being dragged out of their homes, brutalized, arrested, and deported. Arguably, any given non-Latino citizen of the United States who today is protesting ICE tactics is doing what they would have done to protest Gestapo tactics ninety years ago at the very beginning of the Nazi regime. But what if protesting came at a cost? What if it could result in job loss, incarceration, deportation? Would citizens of conscience still rally or would they turn away? At what point does turning away amount to complicity? When will we ask ourselves if there was more we could have done? Despite our relative powerlessness.
What more could Hélène Bouton have done? Despite her youth. Despite not officially being in a position to effect change. Could she have done more to help Isaiah Langwill? Could Gertrude Stein have?
In 2005, Hélène returns to Paris for the wedding of her niece, Cecilia, a passionate, irascible, young woman engaged to a secular Muslim physician. The student riots, the crackdown on Muslim immigrants, the rising political tensions, and the long simmering estrangement from her brother which is about to end at the wedding, trigger Hélène’s memories and call her to action.
While Helen Button was a minor character in a Gertrude Stein novel, here she is a fully realized woman. Her life experience and her work with dying children have bestowed on her a touch of wisdom. As Hélène prepares to see her brother for the first time since their mother’s funeral thirty years ago, she relives her youth and reveals the mystery of Isaiah Langwill.
The parallels between occupied France, 2005 Paris, and 2025 MAGA America—the thirst for mass deportation, the scapegoating of minorities, the contempt for “the other,” the galling exceptions to the rule—are on full display here, even though the novel itself ends twenty years ago.
Helen Button is a cautionary tale about the choices we make, the outcomes we endure, and the effect of our relationships on our character, our community, our nation, and our world.
About the reviewer: Louis Greenstein is the author of the novels Mr. Boardwalk and The Song of Life. www.louisgreenstein.com