Harriet and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1984, 1907, 1900s, 1892, 1877
" . . . In the early 1900s Gertrude Stein, figuratively, swam far out to sea, caught an incoming wave, rode it to shore, and planted her flag triumphantly in the twentieth century. Of her abundant achievements, none superceded her early understanding and enthusiastic espousal of the baffling new age. She sensed the character of the emerging epoch, said Stein, because she was a westerner and had a pioneer's affinity for the new. Like other westerners who went east (to Paris) to find the timeless West within the mind (as literary critic William Gass put it), Stein was most extravagantly a westerner when far from home.
" . . . Stein described her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, the granddaughter of a Jewish Forty-niner, to be "as ardently Californian as I." The pair met in Paris in 1907. Their relationship was partially revealed in the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's rendition of her dutiful but acerbic mate's views of the great and obscure who passed through their ménage.
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" . . . In 1892 Gertrude went to live with her relatives in Baltimore (after her parents' deaths) and then enrolled at Radcliffe to be near Leo (her favorite brother) who was studying at Harvard. Three years later . . . the pair established themselves in Paris . . . at 27 rue de Fleurus (sic). . . Leo began collecting the works of Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso . . .
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"Alice Babette Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877 . . . and was raised in Seattle . . . she enrolled in the University of Washington to study music, hoping to become a concert pianist . . . sent to live in San Francisco . . . her friends Michael and Sarah Stein, Gertrude's brother and sister-in -law . . . traveled to Paris in 1907 . . . The forty-year union ultimately yielded a controversial body of novels, plays, poems, essays, and criticism; friendships-enduring and ephemeral-with some of the twentieth century's cultural pathfinders . . ." pp. 188, 189, 190, 191