THE MEASURE OF EMPATHY: A Novel of Edith Stein

Before she became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she was Edith Stein—a fiercely intelligent Jewish girl who refused to accept any truth she had not examined for herself.
Raised in Breslau by Augusta, her formidable widowed mother, Edith abandons prayer as a teenager and turns instead to the life of the mind. At the University of Göttingen, she enters the brilliant circle surrounding philosopher Edmund Husserl and begins her groundbreaking study of empathy: How can one human being truly understand the experience of another?
War, professional rejection, friendship, and grief carry that question beyond the lecture hall. An encounter with the writings of Teresa of Ávila leads Edith toward Catholicism, but her conversion brings pain to the mother and Jewish family she deeply loves. When the Nazi regime strips her of her teaching position, she enters the Carmelite convent—only to discover that neither baptism nor the convent walls can separate her from the persecuted people into whom she was born.
From the intellectual ferment of prewar Germany to the terror of Westerbork, The Measure of Empathy tells the remarkable story of a philosopher, teacher, daughter, convert, and Jewish victim of the Holocaust. It is a novel about the search for truth—and the terrible responsibility that begins when another person’s suffering becomes impossible to ignore.