Life In a Jewish Family

The scholarly framework of the 1986 translation from the German, EDITH STEIN - LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1891 - 1916: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY is close to perfect. This autobiography is Volume One of the Collected Works of Edith Stein: Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Discalced Carmelite 1891-1942. Publisher is ICS Publications of Washington, D.C. ICS is the Institute of Carmelite Studies, which publishes exclusively books by or about men and women of the aforenamed Roman Catholic religious order, such as Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. Edith Stein, gassed at Auschwitz August 9, 1942, was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998. *** Paradoxically, in the years 1891 - 1916, Stein's first 25 of a life cut short at age 50, there is no hint that in 1922 Stein will be baptized Catholic and eleven years later become a Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was born into a Jewish family in Breslau (Prussian Silesia). Her widowed mother was very religious, but none of the seven surviving Stein children were Orthodox. By her early teens, Edith Stein had stopped praying and had thought her intellectually rebellious way into a quiet form of atheism. *** The scholarly apparatus surrounding Stein's autobiography is massive: from Preface to the Unabridged German Editon, through Editor's Foreword, Chronology 1916 - 1942, Translator's Afterword, 235 End Notes to Photo Credits, Index, List of Places and a final fold out map: An Approximate Guide to Edith Stein's World. If there is a better scholarly approach to recreating and translating the barely surviving, fragmentary manuscript of a work written in haste mainly in 1933, I have never seen it. *** Then there is Stein's narrative itself: ten chapters spread over 485 pages. Edith Stein's memory for detail is prodigious. Once she mistitles a work by Goethe with the name of a similar work by BIsmarck. Once again when writing of her nursing-assistant patients in an World War One infectious disease ward for Austrian soldiers, she confesses that she cannot remember the name of a certain Italian civilian, so she calls him Mario. Otherwise recall of names, dates, places, incidents, schoolroom activities and on and on seems photographic and very accurate. In any case every important factual claim is run down in notes by the very able translator, Carmelite nun Josephine Koeppel. *** I found the first three chapters (to page 114) rather general and uninteresting: family memories of ancestors by Frau Augustine Stein, Edith's mother plus current relationships among the extended paternal (Stein) and Courant (mother) relations, as well as kindergarten and grade school years of youngest child Edith and her older sister Erna. The final seven chapters are increasingly fascinating as it becomes clear that Edith Stein had an IQ that would go off any chart. She absorbed languages like a sponge, read widely and thought for herself. Curiously, although Breslau had a distinguished Jewish research institute, Edith Stein's friends of all ages were overwhelmingly secularized, assimilated German Jews. She also showed no curiosity before her university years either about the beautiful Catholic and Protestant churches of Silesia or the Christian religion. *** Some months ago I returned to reading academic philosophy after a fifty year absence. I chose the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1838) as my re-entry point. In short order I discovered his gifted research assistant and star philosophy student Edith Stein. Her AUTOBIOGRAPHY essentially stops in 1916 when she was awarded a PhD degree for a dissertation written for Husserl, with an extremely rare summa cum laude commendation from the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. Dissertation's subject was Empathy. And there, still only a philosophical "apprentice," Stein broke new ground. She may, in the process, have made herself the first philosopher of consciousness to begin from the point of view of a thinker who is tired and distracted! You can't imagine Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore I am") starting anywhere but total lucidity. *** Edith Stein's AUTOBIOGRAPHY is no Life of Saint. She had been a Christian for 11 years when she wrote most of the manuscript in 1933. But she describes the life of a somewhat priggish, judgmental but friendly non-practicing Jewish atheist. She was rather reserved and detached, but beloved by her high school students. For them she learned to dress well. But Edith Stein's is a ladylike, far from rambunctious "Saint Augustine before his conversion" kind of confession. Extraordinarily fascinating -- if only for all the young philosophers she interacted with such as Martin Heidegger. -OOO-