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37 The Vision of Helen Patch Elissa Gelfand I cannot think of a more propitious moment than our own to reflect on the extraordinary event that was Pontigny-en-Amérique, a series of three summer retreats held during World War II in which some of Europe’s best minds gathered at Mount Holyoke College to talk and argue about nothing less than the future of Western civilization. In light of the frenzy of anti-French sentiment that has swelled in this country in the wake of the war in Iraq—an occurrence I fear I cannot take lightly, “freedom fries” notwithstanding—the words of one of Pontigny’s creators, the eminent medieval scholar Gustave Cohen, ring with particular poignancy. In his 1944 essay “The Teaching of French Outside of France,”written upon his return to Paris from exile, Cohen says of the United States: “This is a country where [France] enjoys immense intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional respect. This respect is based both on a hundred-and-fifty-year-old alliance that was forged in shared causes and the blood of victories, and on the same passion for liberty and democracy proclaimed in the American and French Declarations of Human Rights.”1 A historical view such as this is, alas, a sorely needed antidote to the current wave of American amnesia. An equally compelling reason for honoring Pontigny is the rise in anti-Semitic incidents that has blighted Europe in recent years. Desecrations of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, along with the slippery usage of “anti-Zionist” rhetoric in some political circles, remind us that the impulse underlying Vichy’s “racial laws” has not entirely disappeared. We remember that Vichy forced French Jews to wear the yellow Star of David on their coats and deported them to Drancy and to German and Polish camps; of the 76,000 Jews sent to camps from France, only 3 percent returned.2 But we also need to be mindful of the striking instances of generosity on the part of Americans during the Occupation: for example, the Rockefeller Foundation helped prominent Jewish refugees such as Gustave Cohen and the philosopher Jean Wahl establish a university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York, and the Pontigny sessions at Mount Holyoke welcomed European Jewish scholars who had been stripped of their academic and professional functions. Jean Wahl drew on his Pontigny experience when he summarized the wartime United States as“[l’]Admirable Amérique de 1942–1943.”3 My own point of entry into Pontigny-en-Amérique was my predecessor, Helen Patch, chair of the Mount Holyoke French Department during the first 38 ElissaGelfand half of the 1940s. Previously, all I knew of Professor Patch was the prize that carries her name and that we still award annually for excellence in French. I also knew she had published her doctoral dissertation on the nineteenthcentury poet, novelist, and critic Théophile Gautier, whose rejection of bourgeois philistinism might well have resonated with her own intellectual courage.4 When I learned that Patch had been the impetus for the wartime recreation on this campus of the original Burgundian Pontigny meetings, I couldn’t help wondering what motivated her.Why would a faculty member at a relatively isolated women’s college undertake to bring together, during a time of global crisis, some of the finest minds of her generation? Why would her reach be so geographically broad? And why would her vision bridge the humanities,the sciences,and the social sciences,in an era when the disciplines were deeply entrenched in American universities? As for the international profile of Pontigny at Mount Holyoke, Laurent Jeanpierre sees its roots in the “missionary experience [that] was considered a necessary part of the education [the college] offered”; one consequence of that missionary heritage was that “Mount Holyoke students had an international outlook and a greater curiosity about other countries than young people who attended other institutions .” Jeanpierre aptly summarizes, “The intellectual culture of Mount Holyoke, though of a type very much in the minority in the American academic world of that time, was nonetheless quite close to what the spirit of [the original Pontigny in Burgundy] represented in French and European intellectual circles during the period between the wars.”5 To find out more about the interdisciplinary scope of Patch’s project, I read her annual chair’s reports to the college president, Roswell Ham, an ardent supporter of the Pontigny-en-Amérique initiative. At its inception...

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