PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksPlunder is unique in its form, if not in its author’s insistence that his is not one of those memoirs. And he is not wrong. Kaiser manages to disrupt the genre because he is less obsessed with uncovering his roots and more intrigued by chasing a good story. He notes that \'truths unravel, and fictions fit snugly,\' making the goal of his memoir to ask more questions rather than turn away when a story’s fabric begins to fray ... Treasure is ostensibly at the core of this soul-searching memoir: both Kaiser’s quest for the treasure that is his grandfather’s property in Poland and the Nazi loot the Silesian treasure hunters spend their lives dedicated to chasing, serendipitously using a memoir by Kaiser’s cousin as a map. And yet, mostly it feels like readers need to keep digging as they read because Kaiser points out that the true spoils of the memoir are the story itself and how it might help shape him and us. Reading each section of this book is akin to unwrapping a new layer of a Russian nesting doll: as soon as you think you have reached the core of the narrative, you discover that there is another layer to break open ... the author puts his arm around the reader’s shoulder and pulls in close ... The journey is made particularly enjoyable by Kaiser’s wry, sarcastic tone ... Kaiser made me think in new ways about what it means to hold on to the Holocaust—what it means for any marginalized person or group to carry and bear witness to the collective trauma of their history, to save it from extinction.
