Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust; Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (1999)

Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust; Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, by Rachel Feldhay BrennerEver since the Nazi era the humanist project, and especially art, has been put in question. The Shoah was specifically a Jewish catastrophe, but it also had disastrous implications for all of western civilization. Rachel Feldhay Brenner's were at the very heart of the Holocaust, and she uses their lives and writings as a test of the viability of humanism. While Simone Weil starved herself to death in London as a more or less direct result of the Nazi occupation of Europe, Edith Stein, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum were all killed in Nazi camps. They were all women condemned to die as Jews by Nazi Germany, yet all of them to a greater or lesser extent were products of a secular humanist or Christian education. Brenner asks herself what these writers did as women writers, as Jews, as humanists against the murderous might of the Nazi empire.Brenner has chosen a fascinating topic but has not written a compelling book. Discussions of and are both cramped as a result of Brenner's attempt to cover a broader field than the title suggests. After highlighting the terms in the title she uses very loosely to cover a wide variety of vaguely oppositional practices, and as resistance is poorly distinguished from other instances of writing or the resistance of the authors' lives. By spending a longer time on a discussion of the diaries and autobiographies Brenner could have acknowledged the worth of the eponymous writings that she claims are important but to which she barely allocates thirty pages.After an introduction which gives some context for thinking about the women's resistance, Writing as Resistance comprises four discrete parts dealing with resistance in terms of humanism, Judaism, autobiography, and womanhood, respectively. One way of linking the observations on these topics would have been to use each of the women's stories to establish her unique position in the text. The opening chapters leave the subjects of the book confusingly undifferentiated as mere names in lists such as who did or did not subscribe to Judaism, who was baptized, who was under direct threat from the Nazis. It is only as the second part begins on page 50 that Brenner really concentrates on providing a coherent account of each individual. It is no coincidence that this is the point at which the book begins to talk about religious identification, which, although Brenner refuses to accede explicit priority to any perspective, is clearly the topic that intrigues her most and is the one to which she returns in the conclusion.There are three books that Brenner should have written, instead of this one volume. The first is an explanation of the thought of Simone Weil from the perspective of a woman writing in the Holocaust. The incisive analysis that Brenner begins in her description of Weirs mystico-philosophical concept of de-creation could have unfolded, and the speculations that she makes about the relationship between the metaphorical abnegation of self and the physical act of suicide could have been more fully substantiated. …