Joyce Avrech Berkman, Edith Stein’s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916: A Companion, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 170 pages. ISBN 978-1-66691-249-4.
Reviewed by Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University
A leading historian of the life and work of Edith Stein, Joyce Avrech Berkman presents readers with an outstanding new volume on Edith Stein’s autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family. Philosophers interested in the phenomenological movement, Continental philosophy, as well as medieval philosophy will find this work enlightening as Berkman highlights important facts and observations about Stein’s philosophical and personal trajectory, including her relationships with Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Erich Przywara, among others. Historians and scholars interested in personal narrative and autobiography will also find this volume valuable as the author develops a critical framework for approaching and assessing autobiographical works through her engagement with Stein’s own autobiography. Philosophically speaking, Berkman also presents notable reflections on the role and potential uses of autobiographical thinking for philosophy itself.
The companion guide opens with an introduction in which the author explains how her text unfolds: the first part focuses on a close reading of Stein’s autobiography, which provides readers a description and assessment of significant aspects of its content, especially in relation to its reception by Stein’s family as it moved through various publication and translation processes after Stein’s death; the second part of the book explores questions, from the methodological perspective of an historian interested in ideas and philosophy, arising from and critical assessments of Stein’s project as well as her autobiography and personal narratives.
Chapter one closely examines Stein’s own text, which was written, as Stein notes, to show what Jewish life was like and how it was no different than life in non-Jewish families. Stein’s autobiography was written as Jews faced growing hate and violence in Germany under National Socialist rule. Berkman provides useful background information about Stein’s native city of Breslau and the Jewish community living in this vibrant and important commercial city. Berkman identifies the objective of her reading of Life: “My synopses of each of the ten chapters of Life and of their internal sections aim to bring sharper focus on Stein’s impersonal and personal goals and their overlapping interplay” (19). For example, the first part of the autobiography opens with a reflection on Stein’s parents and grandparents, with special emphasis on her mother. In a deep sense, Berkman rightly reads Stein’s autobiography as a “tribute” (25) to her mother’s strength, resilience, and profound love for her children. Furthermore, Berkman makes sure to provide useful historical information, which serves to better contextualise and grasp Stein’s own life and her writing about it. For example, the historical background provided explains the German school system as well as academic and professional opportunities open to women at the time (1907–1910). One sees here Stein’s own determination to not settle for what was available to women in her own day; rather, we see how Stein envisions what could be possible for her, which includes, as we see later, a deep commitment to social reform, especially on women’s right to vote and to hold academic positions at German universities. Phenomenologists interested in the relationship, both personal and philosophical, will find Berkman’s discussion of Stein’s university days at Göttingen very useful. For example, Berkman nicely chronicles how Stein’s focus on empathy, which was developed in her doctoral dissertation, consolidated both Husserl’s and Stein’s own views on the topic (55).
Chapter two, “Grasping the Meaning of Life,” achieves two important tasks. First, it sets the autobiography “within the history and theory of the genre of self-narrative” (74). Scholars interested in narrative theory and autobiography will find Berkman’s ample engagement with key scholars in the field enlightening, especially as the author navigates between modern and postmodern forms of narrative and their interpretation. Second, Berkman unpacks for readers the significance of important moments in the autobiography: “The second section’s discussion of Life’s themes, perspectives, and judgments, reveal much about Stein’s life outlook, her moral, social, political, and aesthetic assumptions and values, as well as her psychological dynamics (her needs, wishes, and desires). They also unveil her values’ historic and cultural influences and wherein she resisted dominant mores and presented alternative values. This chapter further explores Life in relation to Stein’s other autobiographical and biographical writings, and to aspects of her scholarly philosophical writing, highlighting pertinent points of correspondence and deviation” (74–75). I find this section of Berkman’s book most gripping, for it presents us with another Stein: we understand and come to learn about why perhaps Stein may have written what she did, what lies behind Stein’s own words, for example, what may have lay behind Stein’s own suicidal urges (85). Moreover, the use of Stein’s self-narrative outside of Life helps readers supplement what was started but remained unfinished in it. For those familiar with Berkman’s scholarship on Stein, readers will immediately recognise how Berkman’s analyses help us delve more deeply into the complexity and life of Stein. Berkman succeeds in helping us amplify our understanding of Stein and her rich existence.
The book concludes with chapter three, “The Afterlife of Life.” Though Stein’s work has been studied in both philosophy and theology, and though Life has been an important source of spiritual and religious testimonials of Stein’s heroism in the face of murderous Nazi oppression, it should also be remembered the autobiography has been taken up and explored by playwrights, artists, filmmakers, sculptors, and glass window designers. (131). For example, Berkman discusses the playwright Arthur Giron’s play, Edith Stein (145). Fascinating and revealing here, too, is the reception of and reaction to Life by Stein’s own family. Berkman writes: “Ilse Gordon, whom Stein cared for during her roughly eight months’ stay with her sister Else and her family in Hamburg…offered a mixed reaction. She deemed Life as mostly “in agreement with what I myself experienced and found out during my vacations spent in my grandmother’s. But the book contains a few errors.” Gordon cites Stein’s mistaken dates and attacks Stein’s views of her religious attitudes as “too curt and judgmental” (133). Berkman writes about Susanne Batzdorff’s, Stein’s niece, father’s reaction to Life: “Most upset with Life’s depiction of family members was Susanne Batzdorff’s father, Hans Biberstein, who decried Stein’s highly unsympathetic portrayal of his mother and self-serving white-wash of Stein’s mother as “gross misrepresentations” (133). Finally, Berkman views Susanne Batzdorff’s position as a middle ground view of Life: “Although Susanne Batzdorff denounced Stein’s critique Susanne’s father and [paternal] grandmother as ranging from “ridicule to sharp censure,” Batzdorff trod a tactful middle course. Allowing for natural biases in both Edith Stein and family members as well as for the fallibility of memory, she concludes: “while I do not want to accuse Edith of deliberate distortion of facts, I do detect in her story a one-sided point of view in which she somewhat uncritically takes the side of her mother….but, in all, we are glad to have the authentic document from the hand of an aunt we all loved and revered” (133). By chronicling how some of Stein’s family received Life, we not only learn more about Stein’s rich and personal family life, but we also see Stein herself from a different perspective, which creates an important critical distance, especially when we begin to investigate and assess Stein’s works, including Life.
Berkman’s book is deeply informative and insightful. She unpacks for us the rich layers of Stein’s person and life as they appear in the autobiography and in other writings. From a philosophical perspective, this companion guide allows one to understand the motivations and contexts that help give birth to Stein’s own philosophical corpus, both the early phenomenological works and the philosopher’s later engagements with Scholastic philosophy. Berkman has written an invaluable book that will help Stein scholars and those interested in her life grasp the depth and breadth, to use a Steinian turn of phrase describing the human soul, of her person and its living legacy.