In Search: An Autobiography

The acclaimed autobiography of the Chicago journalist and author hailed as "the most significant American Jewish writer" of the mid-twentieth century ( Los Angeles Times ). Raised in the notorious Bloody Nineteenth Ward in Chicago, Meyer Levin landed a job at the Chicago Daily News at eighteen. He pursued reporting as a means to support his fiction writing, yet it was as a war correspondent that Levin found his voice. One of the first Americans to enter the concentration camps during World War II and record the horrors there, Levin also helped smuggle Jews from Poland to Palestine, capturing the events in his now classic film The Illegals. In this vivid chronicle, Levin traverses America, France, Spain, Eastern Europe and Palestine, incisively documenting some of the most important events of the twentieth century. Yet In Search is equally the story of Levin's quest to define his Jewishness to himself and to the world. Both personal and universal, it affords a glimpse into a singular life and career and is, as Levin puts it, "more than a book about the Jews; it seeks to touch the human spirit."