Edith Stein’s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916 is a treasure trove for the study of Stein’s youth and early adulthood, her approach to writing autobiographically, and her intricate relationship with historical influences of her time and place. Through intellectual mining Stein’s narrative and conducting a comprehensive historical analysis of Stein’s achievement as a distinct type of autobiography, Joyce Avrech Berkman argues that a key axis of Stein’s consciousness, values, philosophical ideas, and life choices is a deep, tense, unresolved, philosophical, and spiritual struggle to both uphold traditional societal and cultural values and practices and also critiquing them to pioneer new patterns of thought. Berkman further probes the sharply controversial nature of Stein’s autobiography for her family members and Stein scholars in the decades after her death. Edith Stein’s Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916: A Companion serves as an important guide to scholars in autobiographical studies, history, philosophy, and theology, as well as to a broader readership interested in Stein’s life for religious and cultural reasons.

Joyce Avrech Berkman is professor emerita of history at the University of Massachusetts.