Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure

by Meir Menachem Kaiser Narrated by Meir Menachem Kaiser

Overview

A New York Times Critics' Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography

From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family's apartment building in Poland-and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows

Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery-that his grandfather's cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex-leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance-material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

This audiobook is a primer on the challenges of recovering property stolen by the Nazis, but it is also much more. Ably read by author Menachem Kaiser, the revealing audiobook chronicles the traps, thieves, friends, and charlatans he encountered during his quest to reclaim his grandfather’s purloined real estate in Poland. Kaiser describes his mission in detail and brings out the personalities of the people he meets, doing so at a reasonable pace and with an intensity that often eludes author/narrators. In addition to describing his search in fascinating detail, Kaiser discusses many of the questions that inevitably arise during such endeavors, particularly as survivors dwindle in number and memories fade. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/12/2021

Kaiser debuts with a spellbinding account of his quest to reclaim an apartment building that was once owned by his grandfather but taken from him by the Nazis. Kaiser is frank about the context of his reclamation. For starters, he’d never met his grandfather. But after a visit to Sosnowiec, Poland, in 2015, Kaiser took it upon himself to repossess the property his family lost during the Holocaust. Hiring a lawyer (called “The Killer”) to represent him, Kaiser set out on a twisty path as shocking information on his lineage came to light—namely, that his grandfather’s cousin, Abraham Kajzer, wrote a secret memoir while working as a slave laborer on the Nazi’s mysterious Riese project. This revelation caught the attention of a group of eccentric Silesian treasure hunters who believed Kaiser was Abraham’s own grandson, suddenly turning him into a pseudo-celebrity. Meanwhile, the complicated legacy of WWII haunts Kaiser: the people who lived in his grandfather’s building “benefited from the wholesale murder of my family,” he writes. (“Let’s embrace the stereotypes, I’ll be the Jew coming back for his property and you be the fearful Pole.”) Yet at the same time, he wonders if, by upending people’s lives with his claim, he’s complicit in the problem, too. Superbly written, this page-turner reads like a gripping adventure novel. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

A twisting and reverberant and consistently enthralling story. It’s a weird story that gets weirder … Kaiser is a reflective man on the page, with a lively mind. He dwells on the moral seesaw he finds himself on … Kaiser considers the nature of conspiracy theories, in a way that’s highly relevant to our era. (His thinking about reparations of various kinds is as complex and timely.) … Plunder has many stories to tell … many moods and registers. It acquires moral gravity. It pays tender and respectful attention to forgotten lives. It is also alert to melancholic forms of comedy. Tonally I was reminded at times of Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent first novel, Everything Is Illuminated … Traveling on a private road, closer to the ground, and at a slower pace, [Kaiser’s] walk turns up details that are fresh, unexpected and significant. His perceptions are sharp. We partake of his curiosity.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “This is weird, complicated territory — by which I mean it’s fantastic . . . ‘Plunder’ thrives as a morally complicated travelogue . . . it is original, and it finishes strong. Kaiser chases down the facts (fingers-crossed) of Abraham Kajzer’s story, and they devastated me. It’s not spoiling things to say that Kajzer survived the absolute worst humanity had to offer only to abandon life’s greatest reward. From the distance of all these years his choice is incomprehensible. It’s our duty to try to understand anyway.”—The New York Times Book Review “Often hilarious, often poignant … A light tone belies the book’s seriousness of purpose: to tease out thorny issues of inheritance, reparations, and what it means to honor one’s dead.” —New Yorker   “[Kaiser’s] rabbit-hole quest leads to wild encounters with Nazi treasure hunters, a lawyer named Killer, and plenty of questions. Fascinating.” —People "A master storyteller embarks on a journey to learn about his grandfather and to reclaim an apartment building that was stolen during the Holocaust. The odyssey is fascinating and thought-provoking."—Christian Science Monitor, The 10 Best Books of March "With smart, elegant prose, [Kaiser] manages to construct an engrossing chronicle of his foray into an elusive past. His narrative is wonderfully digressive, laced with coincidences and ambiguities, and filled with just enough revelations to keep readers contentedly turning pages."—The Forward "A saga of family history and inheritance that reads like a murder mystery, Plunder begins with Menachem Kaiser’s journey to reclaim a Polish apartment building but immediately becomes something far richer and stranger. Probing with unusual insight and humor into questions of memory, loss, and what we owe to the past, this impossible-to-put-down book — part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation on all that history hides from us — marks the debut of a major writer.”—Ruth Franklin, author of NBCC Award-winning Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life   "Exceptionally well written, this candid and suspenseful work recasts the injunction that one generation of survivors demands of all descendants, never to forget. Plunder is a magnificent and stunning literary debut.”—André Aciman, author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name   "Menachem Kaiser is

Library Journal

02/01/2021

In this debut, journalist Kaiser recounts undertaking the recovery of property lost to his family in the Holocaust, and reflects on what he hoped to find. His grandfather, who died before Kaiser was born, survived the Holocaust and resettled in Toronto. However, he was unable to reclaim ownership of an apartment building in Poland, leading Kaiser to take up the claim during a research fellowship in the country in 2010. In the process, he experiences the vagaries of the Polish legal system and the fraught history of Poles and Jews. His narrative describes his common interactions with residents of the town the building is in, as well as the uncommon ones with treasure hunters searching for a mythical train that is rumored to hold hundreds of pounds of gold hidden by Nazis in the nearby mountains. The treasure hunters believe Kaiser is the grandson of a man (with the same last name) who wrote about his slave laborers digging tunnels for the Nazis in these mountains. This coincidence leads him to another branch of living relatives. Occasional family photographs are an added bonus. VERDICT This thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir of family secrets and family lore, like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, will appeal to readers of family histories.—Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL

SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

This audiobook is a primer on the challenges of recovering property stolen by the Nazis, but it is also much more. Ably read by author Menachem Kaiser, the revealing audiobook chronicles the traps, thieves, friends, and charlatans he encountered during his quest to reclaim his grandfather’s purloined real estate in Poland. Kaiser describes his mission in detail and brings out the personalities of the people he meets, doing so at a reasonable pace and with an intensity that often eludes author/narrators. In addition to describing his search in fascinating detail, Kaiser discusses many of the questions that inevitably arise during such endeavors, particularly as survivors dwindle in number and memories fade. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-12-23
In a literate, constantly surprising quest, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor returns to Poland to lay claim to the things of the past.

Early on, Kaiser writes of the “pit stops in the obituary” of his late paternal grandfather, who died in 1977. The author knew that he was born in Poland, survived the Holocaust, and was the sole member of his family to have lived through the terror. Kaiser traveled to Sosnowiec, in south-central Poland, not just to search out family history, but also to explore his grandfather’s claim to family property seized by Nazis. The latter journey took him deep inside the workings of the Polish legal system, with numerous false leads and misinformation throwing him off the trail. It didn’t help that the Kraków lawyer he hired, nicknamed “The Killer,” wasn’t exactly deft with the requisite paperwork. When the author located what he thought was the family property, he encountered a longtime resident who told him, “This is my family’s house.” Kaiser thought to himself, “it wasn’t said defensively or threateningly, he only meant to show off his English,” but it became clear to him that a successful claim would displace others, presenting one of many moral quandaries. Along his path, the author learned about his grandfather’s cousin, who also survived the Nazi occupation, working as a slave laborer in a mysterious tunnel complex that the Nazis had built even as World War II was turning against them. Kaiser’s parallel quest then took him into the concentration camps, sometimes accompanied by treasure hunters who used his relative’s memoir as a guidebook to hidden Nazi loot. Of a piece with Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold (2012), Kaiser’s story approaches the conclusion on an unsettled note that, he laments, would be simpler to resolve if he were writing a novel and not nonfiction—though it does end on a cliffhanger worthy of a thriller.

An exemplary contribution to the recent literature on the fraught history of the Shoah.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178565049
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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