My Lethal Obsession - Hardcover

by Carl Wistreich (Author)

Blending family drama with page-turning suspense, My Lethal Obsession confronts the eternal hatred one group has faced throughout history in very human, very personal terms, and honors the unbreakable will to survive and begin anew.

Gideon Wistreich is haunted by visions of his family's persecution across generations. His visions compel him to abandon his ambition to become a lawyer and embark on a quest to understand why his family, and Jews as a people, have been targets of hatred for millennia. On a deeply personal level, Gideon is tortured by survivor's guilt, struggling to answer why his grandfather chose to flee east at the outset of World War II. The decision led to imprisonment by the Russians in a gulag in Siberia--yet ultimately saved his immediate family--while many of their educated and accomplished relatives who remained in Poland perished.

Gideon's relentless search for truth ultimately places him in the crosshairs of a Cardinal destined to become the next Pope, inciting an encounter that will impact Gideon's family forever. The modern-day narrative and characters are fictional and the earlier generations are creatively drawn from real people and events recorded in family memoirs, which describe those who survived, and those who did not.

Author Biography

Carl Wistreich is the son of Holocaust survivors from Poland and Germany. Following a successful career in business and law, Carl had 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. Not until he was in his fifties and finally had time on his hands to read family memoirs describing miraculous stories of survival did Carl realize these fascinating stories his parents rarely spoke about needed to be shared. Family is the most important thing in Carl's life. Carl's family is what makes him most proud and are a living memorial to his relatives who did not survive the Holocaust.