Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust

Abstract

the conclusion her book, Writing as Resistance, Rachel Feldhay Brenner restates her intent to represent the four women neither as saints nor as emblems of ideological controversies, but rather as individuals who opposed the by insisting on their own humanity (178). The women whom Brenner considers closely are Edith Stein (1891-1942), Simone Weil (1909-1943), Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), and Anne Frank (1929-1945). As a philosopher and literary critic, Brenner undertakes deconstruct the lives of these courageous and doomed women along postmodern lines, an effort that succeeds in utterly dismembering each of them and reconnecting them in a new key. Brenner assumes that her Jewish/Christian/feminist/philosophical/ literary readers are familiar with the biographies of these four Holocaust victims, as she jumps right into a discussion of Enlightenment values, especially Bildung (self-cultivation), on the basis of which she sees all four Western European women have lived fairly assimilated lives. The period of these poor women's lives that Brenner examines span the length of the writings that have survived as their legacy. the case of Stein and Weil, the fruits of their creative endeavors are revealing autobiographies; Frank and Hillesum, on the other hand, were survived by their heartwrenching and inspiring diaries which cover a similar time period-two years of their lives. Again, the reader who has not read these works will feel somewhat left out of the discussion, as the argument centers not on the content of the self-revelations but the act of writing as a form of spiritual resistance. In their acts of writing, the four women defied tyrannical limitations, cut across the boundaries of the decree, denied isolation, and established a relationship that speaks the language of humanism in resistance terror (179). Already Martin Buber, at the turn of the century, acknowledged the word as action. During the Holocaust writing was seen as subversion and severely endangered the author's safety. While afraid and at times depressed, all four women took great risks and tolerated incredible hardship in order leave their mark on history. These women's confessions illuminate how different they are in spite of their common Western European cosmopolitan Jewish backgrounds. This cultural environment and their designation by the Nazis as life unworthy of living binds them a common fate. Yet the way each of them deals with the evil that has befallen them is as different as day and night, as dawn and dusk. The oldest of the women at the time the Nazis came power in 1933, Edith Stein's path destruction seems doubly painful. During her recent canonization by Pope John Paul II tempers flared once again as they had at the time of her beatification. Who should be allowed claim the Jewish woman turned Christian Carmelite nun who was murdered in Auschwitz regardless of her supposedly protective mantle? Jews and Christians both recognize martyrdom as an ultimate good, though for different reasons. Why cannot we mourn the loss of a beautiful