“When I was a young girl, I wanted to be a great lover or a famous saint.”

This is how Abigail L. Rosenthal boldly begins her new book— Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

The work does, and is meant to, follow in the footsteps of Augustine; however, it is a very unique work, and as self-revealing as Augustine’s. The difference is that Rosenthal’s Confessions were written about two millennia later, a time when the budding philosopher was a well-educated but completely puritanical, unbelievably innocent young woman in thrall to philosophy and to ideas in general.

Rosenthal is also the author of the critically acclaimed A Good Look at Evil. Her parents were both well-traveled, European Jewish professors in exile in America who moved in distinguished intellectual circles–the names are very impressive but Rosenthal does not gossip about them. Suffice to say, Richard Wright was her cafe confidante in Paris and Lionel Trilling and the Columbia Tribe were frequent guests at her home in New York City.

Throughout her Confessions, Rosenthal brings in the Greek philosophers, the French existentialists, the themes of opera, art, myth, and literature–in short, she is easily conversant with all manner of High Western Culture. At times, her language is beautiful, lyrical, imaginative. For example:

“What I really would have liked, had it been possible, would have been to step into the backdrop of a Flemish triptych–into one of those many-spired medieval towns, behind the Holy Family–lit by the painter’s pale blue, northern sky. As children imagine themselves able to walk into the looking glass. Anna (her traveling companion) and I might have pictured ourselves walking past the triptychs’ wooden frames and into the scenes depicted in such paintings.”

It was an enchanted time, one in which Rosenthal blithely and safely hitchhiked all across Europe, a moment when Fulbright scholars could live very cheaply in Paris.

Rosenthal’s understanding of antisemitism is unexpected–and unexpectedly profound. She thinks that God chose the Jews because they would “record their encounters with God.” But then she asks a series of questions and states a series of propositions:

“What does it mean to live historically in partnership with God? …With their covenant, the Jews had driven a stake deep into the shifting sands of time.

The predicament of the Jews has to do with the question of whether God really “chose” them. Did God “choose” the Jews?”

Thereafter, Rosenthal posits that once seen as “chosen” and as the “original covenanters” that “everything they did—worthy, unworthy, or plain mediocre—would be the target of envy, misrepresentation, and malice. Second, whenever the covenanters did anything admittedly bad, it would look that much worse.”

Equally unexpected are her revelations about her personal relationships with at least two people in Europe, one in Paris and one in London and Portugal.

Dialogues and Ideas abound, both inner dialogues and conversations, so much so that it almost renders abstract, not quite real, her devastating interactions. She reveals herself as both psychologically and sexually innocent. Both revelations are shameful accounts of being undone.

Rosenthal was not a feminist at the time she begins her memoir, and yet she manages to convey the female experience of that time, perhaps of all times, with an honesty, and a poignancy that is almost unbearable.

There she is, on a Fulbright Scholarship in Paris; she is twenty-one and it is the late 1950s or early 1960s. She meets a man–a Greek man (of course), a man who is a communist atheist, an antisemite, and a predator, a seducer, who violently date-rapes her, very much against her will. He does not use protection; she is terrified that she might become pregnant and, in her mother’s view, become a “woman with a past and (therefore) without a future.”

She writes that this single event “had all the significance of the injustice between the sexes…I despised and hated him but for the first time, also feared his power over me, for if he were to let me go, what would become of me? Abandoned strumpets littered the beaches…Good God! I cried out inexhaustibly, now afraid to push him away.”

She considered drowning herself in the Seine but decided otherwise. (She is quite the romantic.)

Finally, after much anguish and confusion, Rosenthal does leave her first-ever lover; she escapes; she returns to America to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy.

And then–God help her!–she returns to London and chooses or is ensnared by a very angry, manipulative, “mind controller” who is a beautiful “Negro” woman (the descriptor of that time), a woman who exploits and manipulates her, brainwashes her, physically beats her, and endangers her in every way possible. This woman says she is a Gnostic Christian although in reality, she is a very paranoid, hostile woman who is literally insane.

Rosenthal cannot rescue herself. This time she is hopelessly lost. Her parents in America manage to rescue her and she has to be psychiatrically hospitalized to begin a deprogramming process.

I am not sure I’d have the requisite courage to detail my own descent, step by step, into the kind of madness that prisoners-of-war endure via brainwashing. But Rosenthal does so. And she does compare it to prisoner-of-war experiences in Korea. However, no one captured her in battle. It remains entirely unclear as to how and why she volunteered, or was so helpless to defend herself once she was ensnared, held psychologically captive and mind-controlled.

The first half of the book is a treasure and relatively easy to read. The last half is painful, and thus difficult to get through. She exposes her enormous psychological fragility–even as we also recognize her as a card-carrying intellectual.

I recommend this work as a courageous expose of a young girl’s education, a very Candide-like experience.