Book Offers New Reading of Autobiographical Works
Of Women Holocaust Victims

6-4-97
University Park, Pa. --- Penn State Press has just published a moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, in the new book, "Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum."

Author Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization.

Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography."

Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world.

By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them. Stein, Weil, Frank and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt and Nodding, author Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other.

Rachel Feldhay Brenner is associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of "Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing" and "A. M. Klein, The Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion."

Established in 1956, Penn State Press is a university press specializing in art history, black studies, general interest, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, religion, regional studies, sociology, and women's studies.

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Media Contact: Vicki Fong 814-865-9481 (O)/814-238-1221 (H) vyf1@psu.edu

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