Overview

Peter Buck Feller's father disappeared in Moscow in 1938, when Feller was just six months old. As a young boy he asked his mother about him, but his questions went invariably unanswered. Decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Feller embarked on a detailed search to reclaim his father. His journey took him and his adult daughters to Moscow, Siberia, and Germany. He gained access to a now-declassified espionage FBI file, which contained an anonymous letter from a man who had been imprisoned in one of Stalin's gulags: ""I plan to write a book about all what occurred to me during these dreadful ten years. The title of this book, I would like it to be ‘The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller.’"" Feller was stunned. William Schwarzfeller was his lost father, for whom he searched, in one way or another, all of his life. He learned that his father had been an agent for Red Army Intelligence. He was arrested in 1938 and starved to death in a gulag in 1943. This new information led him to a host of discoveries, his mother's vast FBI file, and a story about his father on the front page of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker.

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Reviews

The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller is a remarkable book. Feller narrates his quest to reconstruct the story of his father, who disappeared in Moscow in 1938 when Feller was only six months old. In the process, he tells important stories about the interwar Left in the United States, international espionage, Stalinist terror, and the Gulag. The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller is a gripping family saga that is as moving as it is profound in its depiction of some of the most important episodes of twentieth-century history. * Alan Barenberg, author of The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction *

Author Information

Peter Buck Feller is an independent historian with a particular interest in Soviet-German conflicts and espionage during the Second World War. He has written articles for Foreign Policy, and for The Pennsylvania Gazette.

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