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Helen Button
Winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts.
Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.
In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.
In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon new friends-their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein, and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed "Helen Button" by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène-the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer-grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. In 1939, war begins. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, Hélène takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy, Isaiah, brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène's friendship with the couple becomes strained. Increasingly distressed by Gertrude's unusual political affiliations, Hélène and her lover, Resistance fighter Milo Fourche, begin to spy on the writer through her work. One night near the war's end, Milo learns the Gestapo plan a brutal attack on a nearby safe house for Jewish children. Hélène has the chance to intercept, which could save Isaiah's life, as well. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.
Praise for Helen Button
In Spaulding's intricate debut novel Helen Button, she deftly weaves a dual narrative timeline echoing between dangerous Vichy France during WWII and political upheaval in modern day Paris to tell an atmospheric tale of love and loss, war and death, across multiple generations. A tour de force of extraordinary historical detail, fresh perspectives on well-known figures like Gertrude Stein, and exquisite, lyrical writing, Helen Button is a beautiful examination of fate, survival, and how harrowing moral choices in wartime can have far-reaching effects. The story of Hélène Bouton will stay with me for a long time.
Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide
Helen Button is a carefully crafted, compelling narrative that illuminates little known aspects of World War Two while also drawing parallels with political crises in postcolonial France. Told through the point of view of Hélène, the imagined French-American housekeeper of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the narrative focuses on the plight of children during wartime as well as during times of social and political unrest. In both cases, whether the children are Jewish victims of the Holocaust or Algerian immigrant youth in the impoverished Parisian suburbs in 2005, children are criminalized for merely being who they are. At the same time, the novel forces the reader to examine the ambivalent roles of Stein and Toklas, who were Jewish lesbians and avant-garde artists, in Vichy France when French authorities collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. As readers, we are left wondering why Stein wrote articles that appear to promote the collaborators, even though she is remembered as a supporter of the French Resistance. And we also question whether Stein inadvertently effected the death of 44 Jewish children who were taken to Auschwitz.
Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.
In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.
In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon new friends-their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein, and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed "Helen Button" by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène-the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer-grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. In 1939, war begins. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, Hélène takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy, Isaiah, brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène's friendship with the couple becomes strained. Increasingly distressed by Gertrude's unusual political affiliations, Hélène and her lover, Resistance fighter Milo Fourche, begin to spy on the writer through her work. One night near the war's end, Milo learns the Gestapo plan a brutal attack on a nearby safe house for Jewish children. Hélène has the chance to intercept, which could save Isaiah's life, as well. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.
Praise for Helen Button
In Spaulding's intricate debut novel Helen Button, she deftly weaves a dual narrative timeline echoing between dangerous Vichy France during WWII and political upheaval in modern day Paris to tell an atmospheric tale of love and loss, war and death, across multiple generations. A tour de force of extraordinary historical detail, fresh perspectives on well-known figures like Gertrude Stein, and exquisite, lyrical writing, Helen Button is a beautiful examination of fate, survival, and how harrowing moral choices in wartime can have far-reaching effects. The story of Hélène Bouton will stay with me for a long time.
Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide
Helen Button is a carefully crafted, compelling narrative that illuminates little known aspects of World War Two while also drawing parallels with political crises in postcolonial France. Told through the point of view of Hélène, the imagined French-American housekeeper of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the narrative focuses on the plight of children during wartime as well as during times of social and political unrest. In both cases, whether the children are Jewish victims of the Holocaust or Algerian immigrant youth in the impoverished Parisian suburbs in 2005, children are criminalized for merely being who they are. At the same time, the novel forces the reader to examine the ambivalent roles of Stein and Toklas, who were Jewish lesbians and avant-garde artists, in Vichy France when French authorities collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. As readers, we are left wondering why Stein wrote articles that appear to promote the collaborators, even though she is remembered as a supporter of the French Resistance. And we also question whether Stein inadvertently effected the death of 44 Jewish children who were taken to Auschwitz.
359 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 5, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 23, 2025
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.
Louis Greenstein is the author of the novels Mr. Boardwalk and The Song of Life. www.louisgreenstein.com
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.
Louis Greenstein is the author of the novels Mr. Boardwalk and The Song of Life. www.louisgreenstein.com
March 23, 2025
It's hard to follow the characters, especially with the switches in times, but it still has good writing and character development.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews