The Shoah from being distorted, abused, trivialized, and undermined by blatant lies, memory must time and time again mobilize its collected arsenal of witnesses and documents, to fortify the loosening ground beneath it. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir is one of those testimonies, which in its remarkable sense of detail and unfailing human spirit manages to do just that."--Göran Rosenberg, author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, a winner of the 2012 August Prize, annual Swedish literary prize for the best book of the year.
“This powerful memoir articulates the daily life of a Jew enslaved by the Nazis and forced to do their bidding and obey their every whim in a series of concentration camps. The graphic description of the slave’s miserable condition is counterpointed to the hope of liberation….an account of the triumph of hope over hatred.” –Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Emeritus Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, Editor of The Jewish Street: The City and Modern Jewish Writing, An Anthology
“This is a book to be read and passed down to our children to read."--Miles Lerman, Holocaust survivor and a founding father of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"This memoir is among the best I have read ... a must read that belongs in most libraries [for] high school to adult readers." --Martin Goldberg, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter
Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche's idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood. This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb - once considered the crime of the century - to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption. Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, "the most significant Jewish writer of his times."
Compulsion
Meyer Levin (1905-1981), an American journalist and novelist who worked for the Chicago Daily News and was an editor for Esquire who wrote over a dozen important award-winning novels between 1929 and 1981 including The Old Bunch, The Stronghold, The Story of Israel, Compulsion, and The Fanatic.
“Before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, before Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, there was Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, a docu-novel about the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case in the 1920s…. a convincing portrait of two brilliant psychopaths, a narrative capacity for a spellbinding tale, an authentic depiction of the 1920s Chicago moral and political landscape. Compulsion is a credible portrait of an era, and an early example of an infamous crime turned into compelling fiction.” - Alan Lelchuk, author of American Mischief “For nearly a century now, the Leopold and Loeb case has maintained a firm hold on the popular imagination, generating histories, movies, stage dramas, even musicals and comic books. Of this seemingly endless stream of retellings, Levin’s lightly fictionalized masterpiece—so true to reality that Leopold himself famously sued the author—remains the most gripping, psychologically penetrating, and purely readable account of one of America’s most sensational crimes.” - Harold Schechter, author of The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, The Model, and The Murder that Shook the Nation