A Sure Way
Following Truth in a World on Fire
Mine is the first generation of my family not to speak Yiddish. The significance of this didn’t fully dawn on me until I turned 40. Here I was, living halfway across the world from the city of my birth, St. Petersburg, Russia, which itself is 2,000 miles removed from the region where my Jewish ancestors had lived until 1941. That summer, the Germans marched across Ukraine. Jews from village after village were rounded up and shot, ending up in unmarked mass graves in a forest somewhere on the outskirts of town. My grandparents survived, but by the time the war ended, the world of their childhood was gone forever.
My family left Russia shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, emigrating to Israel along with another million or so Russian Jews. A few years later, we emigrated again—this time to the United States, where I have now spent nearly two-thirds of my life. And in a complicated set of events, the year I turned 30, I left secular Judaism and became a Christian.
On the one hand, every conversion is an extraordinary event, a miracle even. Yet at the same time, the history of the church is filled with tales of converts from Judaism to Christianity. Rarer, though, are written testimonials from women converts, and particularly rare are stories like that of philosopher turned Carmelite nun and mystic Edith Stein. Now Carolyn Beard has edited a new collection of Stein’s work, A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire.
