I used drugs—marijuana, LSD and ecstasy—in the Sixties but I never thought of them as therapeutic. The author, Seth Lorinczi, and his new autobiographical book, Death Trip, A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, has opened my eyes as never before to the idea that psychedelics can help heal the trauma of the Holocaust. In Lorinczi’s telling of the story, psychedelics rescued him, psychological speaking, from the legacy of Fascism, World War II and the extermination of millions of Jews.
Unlike Lorinczi, I knew I was Jewish from the age of three. I also knew about the Holocaust. Knowing that history didn’t protect me from trauma. Now, more than ever before in the wake of Gaza, it’s more challenging to define one’s self as a Jew, and not just as a Jew but as a rational empathetic human being. Maybe we should all take psychedelics together and not sit back and observe the slaughter that’s taking place on nearly every continent and on a scale not seen since World War II.
But in a recent conversation, Lorinczi explained to me that psychedelics can’t work on a mass scale and can’t be expected to heal the trauma experienced by Jews and Palestinians or Russians and Ukrainians. The therapeutic use of psychedelics, he told me, requires a controlled environment and a guide. That’s the route Lorinczi opted for. He used MDMA also known as Ecstasy with a therapist and in her office.
Apparently, some Jews and some Palestinians have used Ayahuasca together to forge bonds and reconcile communities at odds with one another. That was before 10/7. “It may sound like hippie bullshit,” Mattha Busby wrote recently in Vice. Busby added that Ayahuasca brings about “life-changing insights while increasing compassion.” Lorinczi tried Ayahuasca and didn’t like it; ditto for heroin. Same story for me.
For Lorinczi, the road back to the Holocaust began with MDMA. “Without it,” he said, “I would not have explored the dark side of my family’s moon.” In Death Trip, Lorinczi tells riveting stories about his own alienation and angst. The book was published at the end of 2013 and just now is beginning to stir debate and discussion.
Not long ago, Lorinczi talked before a live audience in Portland about his memoir and about “ancestral trauma.” The talk was titled “Judaism & the Psychedelic Renaissance.” That Renaissance is on-going; Jews in Oregon and California are contributing to it.
In Death Trip, Lorinczi invites readers to “enjoy” his narrative, and, while enjoyment is certainly possible, the road that he travels is paved with anxious reflections reminiscent of the writings of Franz Kafka, the Prague-born Jewish author of The Trial and profoundly disturbing stories such as “The Metamorphosis,” “The Man Who Disappeared” and “Before the Law.” When Lorinczi first read “Before the Law” he was blown away. “It encapsulates my own world view,” he told me during a lengthy conversation. Some of Lorinczi’s best writing, I’m happy to say, is reminiscent of Kafka.
Death Trip is really about two trips: one in the labyrinths of the author’s head where he wrestles with dybbuks and devils; and the other in which the author travels to Budapest and roams the city to unlock family secrets. His father, he discovers, survived World War II by denying his Jewish identity and by passing as an Aryan.
Indeed, he volunteered to serve in an organization called Legoltalmi Lia or LEGO which enforced blackouts, drove ambulances and extinguished fires. He was offered a LEGO uniform which his son calls “the perfect disguise.” The author writes, “as far as the rest of the world was concerned, my father was a Nazi soldier.” Many of my own family members were murdered either by Russian or German soldiers in World War II. My grandparents had escaped in the 1890s.
Papa Lorinczi emigrated to the US and became a successful American lawyer. The house in which Seth Lorinczi was raised boasted books about war and fascism, and yet no one ever told him explicitly that he was Jewish. He suspected he was a Jew, but no real evidence proved that identity. The past was hiding in plain sight.
In Buda and in Pest, two sides of Budapest that seem emblematic of Lorinczi’s duality, the author became a detective and came face to face with the Nazi past and with Hungary’s pseudo-Nazi present. In 1944 Hungarians eagerly rounded up Jews and delivered them to the Nazis. Then the Nazis dispatched the Jews to concentration camps. That’s collaboration and a war crime.
Lorinczi does not write about Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister, Vikor Orbán, nor does he write about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and it’s brutal repression by the Soviets, which I clearly remember from my boyhood. The Soviet invasion bled all over the TV news and paralleled the Suez crisis when the British, the French and the Israelis invaded Egypt. Poor Hungary and Poor Egypt. Battered on nearly all sides.
It’s clear to me from reading Death Trip and interviewing the author that he isn’t pro-Russian today and wasn’t pro-Soviet in the days of the Cold War. He’s not ideological or a believer in the efficacy of a discipline party, but rather he’s a believer in psycho-therapy using psychedelics. That method has not been adopted by masses of Americans. It’s not a trend or a fad but it is catching on.
I recently met a California filmmaker whose mother died in a helicopter crash and who has suffered from trauma. He has used psychedelics and has been in therapy. For him, writing poetry and making movies has also helped him heal.
Lorinczi strongly suggests that Orbán’s political success today owes a great deal to unresolved traumas that have allowed him to manipulate Hungarian voters and rally Hungarian citizens, many of whom exist in a state of denial. Perhaps much the same phenomenon can be observed around the world.
Lorinczi describes Budapest today as a “beautiful city” with a lively Jewish community, a booming Jewish tourist industry and the largest synagogue in Europe. On the outside, Budapest appears to be hospitable and even friendly to Jews. But Lorinczi told me that anti-Semitism is alive and well.
He allowed that he has worked though most, though not all of the trauma of war and fascism that he imbibed, some of it unconsciously from his family and especially his father. When I asked him if he would celebrate Passover this year, he said that he wasn’t sure. “I feel Jewish on the edges,” he said. “I don’t know if and how I fit into the Jewish world. It’s something to work on.” It is indeed. Being Jewish is now as always an ongoing project.
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Jonah Raskin is the author of biographies of Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman. He lives in San Francisco.