Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil

The darkness of the decade 1933-1943 was at least partially illumined by the energetic syntheses of thought and action that Courtine-Denamy (Hannah Arendt) skillfully examines in the three remarkable women of this book's subtitle. What animates the comparison are stark differences overlaid on basic similarities: all three were Jews and philosophers, all were imperiled by the Nazi menace. But by 1943 Stein had become a Carmelite nun and perished in Auschwitz; Weil had allied with the French Resistance and died of malnutrition in London; and Arendt had emigrated to New York, where she called for a Jewish army in Palestine. Weil, whose passions split between politics and religion, serves as linchpin for comparisons with the cloistered nun Stein and the fervently Zionist, eminently unmystical Arendt. Stein, the traditional Catholic, accepted her Jewishness; Weil, the wayward gnostic who never converted to the Christianity she loved, did not. Intersecting images from the personal lives of the three women, who never met (of the three, only Arendt knew of the other two), suggest temperamental affinities among them: Stein and Weil memorized the Lord's Prayer in premodern languages (Stein in medieval Gothic, Weil in ancient Greek); at different points of their lives, Arendt and Weil broke into absurdist laughter over the impact of Nazism (Arendt while observing the Eichmann trial, Weil while fleeing France in the company of devout Jews). A glossary of names and terms from French political life during the Nazi years would have enhanced this otherwise highly readable American edition of an originally French work. (Sept.)