My Lethal Obsession is a novel that addresses the Holocaust survival story that has been largely absent from historical memory: the Polish Jews who fled east and survived in the Soviet Union. Of the roughly 300,000 Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust approximately 200,000 did so by fleeing to the Soviet Union. Thus, the story of the majority of Polish survivors is a story that history has almost entirely overlooked. The novel is also a story of ruin visited upon a people, the Jews, by what scholars have called a lethal obsession, but one told through a work of fiction with actual memoirs of the survivors themselves embedded in the narrative in their own voices. The novel takes resilience seriously not as a literary device but as a historical and moral problem: what gets transmitted across generations, what gets lost, and what the failure to transmit costs us. And it is, finally, a story of rebirth of one family in the United States, and a case study in how a people survives not just physically but culturally, across centuries of organized hatred.
Carl Wistreich is the son of Holocaust survivors from Poland and Germany. Following a successful career in business and law, Carl achieved the financial security his grandparents had in their respective countries before they made the lifesaving decision to leave it all, including close relatives, behind. My Lethal Obsession is his debut novel — a lifetime in the making.
Made possible by a generous gift from the Benjamin Zucker Family Fund.
