My Lethal Obsession — Carl Wistreich

The cover features a vintage family photograph. Some faces are clear, the survivors. Others are blurred, those lost to the Holocaust. The dedication reads: "For my relatives with blurred faces on the cover who could not tell their stories and those with clear faces who found it hard to tell our family's story. May their memory be a blessing."

The Book

About the Novel

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.

The Author

Carl Wistreich

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 to read the family memoirs did Carl realize these miraculous stories of survival — stories his parents rarely spoke about — needed to be shared with the world.

Family is the most important thing in Carl's life. His family is what makes him most proud, and they are a living memorial to the relatives who did not survive the Holocaust.

Long Bio

Carl Wistreich is a successful entrepreneur, CEO, and former M&A attorney. Most recently, he served as CEO and Co-owner of AC Business Media Inc., a B2B media and business intelligence company, overseeing its growth and eventual sale. He previously purchased, built, and sold L&B Truck Services, a New England truck dealership group.

Before his entrepreneurial career, Carl spent eight and a half years on the senior management team at C&S Wholesale Grocers, the largest U.S. grocery distributor, during its growth from $3 billion to over $20 billion in revenues. During his time at C&S, Carl played key roles in the structuring, negotiation, and implementation of major outsourcing agreements with retailers aggregating over $15 billion in annual revenue and the acquisition of several substantial companies. In various other roles, Carl held P&L and oversight responsibility for divisions generating over $3 billion in revenue with 2,500 employees, managed the start-up of new distribution facilities, served as general counsel, and was responsible for all human resource, sales, and customer service functions.

Carl began his career as a corporate attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York City. He previously worked for a United States Senator and served as a law clerk for a federal judge. He holds a J.D. from New York Law School (magna cum laude, Law Review) and a B.A. from Colgate University, where he captained the tennis team.

My Lethal Obsession is his debut novel — a lifetime in the making.

Family Photographs