LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891-1916: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Edith Stein
Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1986
548 pp., $10.95
EDITH STEIN: A BIOGRAPHY
Waltraud Herbstrith, translated by Bernard Bonowitz
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985
127 pp., $5.95
Born on Yom Kippur, October 12, 1891, Edith Stein died a Carmelite nun at Auschwitz on August 9, 1842.
On May 1, 1987, Pope John Paul II declared her "blessed" in beatification ceremonies at Cologne, Germany. The next degree of recognition is sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Edith Stein has been "venerable", the initial step in the canonization process, for an uncharacteristically short time - since January 23, 1987.
Unquestionably a remarkable woman in her life and death, Edith Stein crystallized the questions of who we are in relation to ourselves, each other, and God so well that her greatness is universally accepted. The youngest of eleven in a Jewish family, she progressed through the study of philosophy to become a Christian. On the advice of her confessor, she delayed her entrance into a religious order until she was forty-two and then persevered with her choice, living under one of the most difficult religious rules for women. She was a modern Jew who may become a Catholic saint.
In the foreword to her autobiography, she wrote, "Recent months have catapulted the German Jews out of the peaceful existence they had come to take for granted. They have been forced to reflect upon themselves, upon their being, upon their destiny." In September 1933, less than one month before she entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne, she began to review her life from her birth in Breslau to the completion of her doctorate twenty-five years later. Most of her autobiography was written between 1933 and 1935. She returned to the project again in 1939 but did not add a great deal to the manuscript, first published in 1963 by the Archivum Carmelitum Edith Stein in Brussels. The edition reviewed here is Volume I of The Collected Works of Edith Stein, published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington, D.C. Her Essays on Woman will follow as Volume II. Future volumes will probably include her letters and her major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being.
A Search for Truth
Stein reports that though her father died when she was quite young, she grew up surrounded by a large and happy Jewish family. She did not necessarily repudiate Judaism; more strictly she simply stopped thinking about God. By her own account, she believed in nothing from the ages of fifteen to twenty-four, but her education was a search for the truth that ended when she found her truth in Christianity. Her autobiography reports in detail her relations with her brothers and sisters, her classmates and friends, and how her intellectual quest gradually replaced these personal relationships.
By her own
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