Edith Stein Her Life in Photos and Documents

In her lifetime Edith Stein, PhD (1891 - 1942) was a practicing Jew, a convinced atheist since mid-teens, an accomplished philosopher and finally a martyr with millions of others to German Nazi hatred of all things Jewish. She is also a canonized Saint (as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). For her philosophical, autobiographical,political, theological and mystical writings, Edith Stein may someday be proclaimed one of a handful of Doctors of the Universal Church. *** Apart from her long autobiography (LIFE IN A JEWISH FAMILY 1921 - 1916), many of Stein's academic and other writings are intricate, deep and sometimes difficult to unravel. For that reason, as her fame rises, it becomes increasingly necessary to find books notably useful for "introducing" Edith Stein to unfamiliar readers. *** One such stand-out introductory biography was written in German in 1987 by the Saint's fellow Carmelite nun, Sister Maria Amata Neyer, O.C.D. It was translated into English in 1999 by Edith's niece, Waltraut Stein. Its English title: EDITH STEIN: HER LIFE IN PHOTOS AND DOCUMENTS. *** Only 83 pages long, EDITH STEIN is thickly packed with contemporary photos, documents (school leaving papers, baptismal certificates, manuscripts, at least one black and white sketch, citation references and a small bibliography. The chronological authorial narrative is interspersed among the many photos and documents and takes up no more than 40% of the 83 pages. Each word is carefully chosen and the overall result is informative and satisfying.We see young Edith Stein growing up fatherless in Prussian-Polish Breslau in a happy, commercially achieving conventionally Jewish family. Seen by all as intellectually brilliant from her crib, Edith Stein, despite bouts of depression and self-doubt, swept upward and onward through her doctoral dissertation in 1916, a pioneering work on "Empathy." She then bumped into two post-World War I academic glass ceilings: she was Jewish; worse she was a woman. In 1921 she converted from atheism to Roman Catholicism. In 1933 she warned Pope Pius XI that if Nazis were permitted to persecute Jews, Christians would not be far behind. At age 40 she became a Carmelite nun. At age 50 she and her older sister Rose were gassed to death at Auschwitz. *** Author Neyer gives a sense of the substance of Stein's writing and thinking at every stage of her life. If the little book has a weakness, it is that Neyer towards the end goes beyond biographing and, in effects, begins to commend her heroine to readers as a model for how to think and live. I personally agree with that evaluation, but think that making it detracts a bit from a deceptively simple but solid introduction to EDITH STEIN: HER LIFE IN PHOTOS AND DOCUMENTS. -OOO-