Memoir

When a midlife crisis threatens his marriage and an open-minded therapist offers him MDMA, the author learns just how trippy a search for meaning can get.

Like many children of immigrants, Seth Lorinczi knew only the major plot points of his Hungarian family's backstory. But when he stumbles upon his father's long-forgotten memoirs, he realizes the antisemitic violence and trauma suffered by his Holocaust Survivor forebears might be guiding his worldview and actions in unseen ways. Eventually, the quest to learn the truth will take him halfway around the world to an epic showdown with his family's ghosts.

A marriage story, a search for meaning in the wake of the Holocaust, and a struggle to release the weight of ancestral trauma, Death Trip takes readers from the ayahuasca basements of Portland's psychedelic therapy underground to the streets and alleyways of Budapest during the darkest days of World War II. By turns wrenching and hilarious, it asks "can trauma be inherited" and, if so, "can psychedelics help us heal?"

Offering a uniquely literary perspective on the dawning field of psychedelic therapy, Death Trip is a harrowing but ultimately triumphant story about overcoming fear, trauma, and disconnection. Fans of books on psychedelics and books on family secrets will thrill to this quest to learn the truth about the past in order to make sense of the present.

This collection of books featuring Jewish main characters is decidedly non-comprehensive. As we come across books that are described as having Jewish main characters, we add them to this database. The creators of the Jewish Genre Reading Challenge have not read all (or even most) of the books in this database. We have gathered information from many sources and not all may be accurate. Inclusion of a book in our database does not imply endorsement or approval. There is always the possibility that antisemitism may be present in a book, either written into a character's experience or through malicious or ignorant caricature or stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters and culture. Please take care of yourselves as you read.

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