A study of the refugee experience of Edith Stein's family members who fled the Third Reich provides a lens through which to view existing theories of immigration and interpretations of the lives of German-Jewish immigrants.

The Stein family's experience of emigration and transition to a new country provokes questions raised by many German refugee scholars, and immigration scholars in general. These questions concern the impact of emigration on identity and transformation, perception of the country from which the refugees fled and where they settled, motivations to flee, anticipations of the future, and the agony of separation from family and friends. As this book reveals, Stein kin's acculturation experience is both similar and different from that of other German immigrants. Joyce Berkman argues that the Stein kin experience challenges prevalent understanding of typical German refugee acculturation.

This book draws heavily on first-person sources, including oral histories collected by the author from ten offspring of Stein's siblings and her cousin Richard Courant. Other sources include: personal correspondence, short memoirs, and creative writing. Berkman examines a broad range of public documents and relevant scholarly literature and explores the benefits and limitations of first-person accounts for historical understanding.