Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint.

by Susanne M. Batzdorff

Templegate, $14.95, 237 pp.

Lawrence S. Cunningham

Last year's canonization of Edith Stem has only intensified the discussion around the meaning of her martyrdom. Obviously she was murdered at Auschwitz because she was a Jew. But does that mean that her own convictions as a convert and her Catholic witness to the meaning of her life and death cannot be honored? That she was a devout and learned person is beyond doubt, but her relationship with Judaism is the subject of much debate. For that reason we can be grateful for the memoir of Susanne Batzdorff, Edith Stein's niece, who writes broadly of the Stein family. She does this not only to correct some biographical errors which have crept into books on Edith Stein, but to reflect on Stein's own Life in a Jewish Family, which saw posthumous publication. Batzdorff, by the way, also translated and edited Never Forget (1998), the recent volume of essays by Christians and Jews on Edith Stein. Never Forget was originally published in Germany under the care of Waltraud Herbstrith, O.C.D., and is now available from the Institute of Carmelite Publications.

Batzdorff's book will be valuable for future studies of Stein, but for this nonexpert its more important merit is the way in which someone in Stein's family sees a person whom the Catholic church has raised to the altars. What moved me most about this work was the author's (fair) insistence that Edith Stein's Jewish background be honored and represented fairly. Now living in California, Batzdorff has some wonderful closing pages on her own participation in the dialogue between Jews and Christians energized by her memories of Aunt Edith.

Batzdorff asks why Edith Steam, whose sister Rosa went to Auschwitz with her, should be singled out for honors when so many died anonymously in the Nazi death camps. Nobody can answer that question. Why did Anne Frank's diary survive? How did we manage to get the letters of Etty Hillesum which were written in the transit camp at Westerbork in Holland (Etty mentions the Catholic nuns - among them Edith Stein) while she was waiting transport to the East? One thing is very clear. The canonization of Edith Stein must never be seen as a moment of Catholic triumph. Her life, death, and subsequent honors should be seen as a kind of prophetic moment which made concrete the sadly complex story of Jews and Christians at a terrible time in human history.

Who knows how much or how accurately the pope calculated the impact of this canonization on the Jewish community. My guess is that there were so many elements in Stein's life that attracted John Paul that her character became irresistible to him. How could he not love a woman who was a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition (they both shared a passion for Max Scheler), who converted not from Judaism but from atheism under the influence of Carmelite spirituality (it was Teresa of Avila's autobiography that led her to convert), and who ended up writing a book on John of the Cross (the pope wrote his theology dissertation on John)? One must remember that Karol Wojtyla himself almost entered the Carmelites as a young man. That Stein died at the hands of the Nazis made her, in the pope's mind, a martyr to the demonic irrational forces he himself battled as a young man. It is also useful to recall that Stein is mentioned as a model of the sapiential thinker in the recent encyclical Fides et ratio. John Paul, in other words, would find in her a congenial fellow spirit with common interests and a similarly shaped spirituality.

Aunt Edith provides, as a series of appendices, information on groups that have a special interest in Edith Stein, a good bibliography of Stein's writings (published and unpublished), and an adequate index. All of Edith Stein's writings have been or are in the process of being published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies. Edith Stein, then, stands in the tradition of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Lawrence of the Resurrection, Therese of Lisieux, and Elizabeth of the Trinity. Good company indeed!

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.