Heroes: Wide-Eyed But Successful

Last night, spurred by the opening of the new Karl Stern archives at Duquesne University, I started The Pillar of Fire, the autobiography of Karl Stern, the Jewish psychoanalyst who entered the Catholic Church. In the beginning he tells of his childhood and youth in Bavaria, and describes some fascinating people. His friend Reha Freier, for one.

Reha (short for Rebekka) was, when I first knew her, quite young. She was married to a Rabbi. She was beautiful, of a simple Biblical beauty, someone right out of the Old Testament. She represented a type which occurs in every political or religious movement, the sort of person who causes others to despair.  She seemed utterly disorganized and full of unbelievably impractical ideas. Although she was a mother of five I am not sure whether she could have fried an egg or made tea.  If she did it she might have kept her hat on, even her overcoat — and it would most likely be a man’s coat.

She was an extraordinary linguist, and she was able to keep an audience spellbound. Her Hebrew was beautiful. When she had, in an emergency, to travel to some Balkan country, she was able to learn, on the train, enough of the language to make a speech. Since she thought and lived on a plane of practical impossibilities, she actually carried things out which no practical person could have achieved.  She was the first one to have the idea (long before anyone knew what Nazis were) of getting Jewish children out of Europe and settling them on farms in Palestine. She had this idea before the great American Jewess Henrietta Szold conceived it, or at least quite independent of her.

When there was a pogrom in a Roumanian town, it was not impossible for her to travel there and appear before the mayor, demanding that they organize a transport of Jewish children, a special train and everything. It was her strong point to appear before the most unlikely people, wide-eyed and with flowing robes, speaking not in terms of committee meetings and majority resolutions but in the language which King David used in his Psalms. With this embarrassingly naive and direct method she occasionally had stunning success.

Here’s a profile of Stern from the Tablet. (It quotes Daniel Burston, the Duquesne psychology professor who created the archives.) The descriptive paragraph:

Back in 1939, his young family settled in a jerry-built row house near the mental hospital where he worked on Montreal’s outskirts. A decade later, he would become one of Canada’s founding fathers of psychiatry. He would write best-sellers like The Pillar of Fire, reprinted 17 times in paperback and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and German. His 1961 study on psychology and religion, The Third Revolution, would spark correspondence with Carl Jung. The Flight From Woman (1965), a philosophical treatise on modern society’s polarization of the sexes and its de-feminization, would make him a common name in women’s magazines. He corresponded with leading rabbis, poets, and writers — Robert Lowell, Ivan Illich, C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton — and other religious luminaries of his day. Along with Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, he would join UNESCO’s Committee of Experts on German Questions. Graham Greene was his houseguest. American Catholic activist Dorothy Day was a close friend. He would be profiled in Time and write for the New York Times.