Menachem Kaiser’s Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure tells 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 ... 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.
Kaiser is a sober, responsible narrator, concerned with the moral implications of his quest and the persistent challenges of separating fact from fiction. Though it only illuminates a small portion of the enormity that was the Nazi genocide, Plunder is an account that’s undeniably worthy of its subject.
... a book in which both my grandparents would recognize themselves ... This is weird, complicated territory—by which I mean it’s fantastic ... thrives as a morally complicated travelogue, but when the action slows—and the Polish legal reclamation process is, uh, not swift—things can get a little hairy. A chapter of rhetorical dialogue about reclamation ethics comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and the author’s conversations with his living relatives feel stifled, like something’s being held back. It’s not the first book that would benefit from 50 pages falling out of the binding ... But it is original, and it finishes strong.
... not an easy book to categorize because it shuttles seamlessly between history, travelogue, and commentary. Ultimately, this is a personal narrative – a gifted writer’s effort to understand his grandfather’s life – that turned out to be far richer and more varied than the author ever envisioned when he undertook this journey. And it makes for a fascinating and thought-provoking read.
Plunder 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.
... with smart, elegant prose, he 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 ... Of course, this is not exactly the family history Kaiser had been seeking. His own grandfather remains inaccessible, a historical cipher. His struggle to reclaim the contested building is similarly frustrating. As of his publication deadline, his court case, plagued by errors and delays, was still ongoing, with no resolution in sight. Lamenting that he lacks the inventive freedom of a novelist, Kaiser makes the best of his limitations and failures.
Kaiser has crafted a book that’s several intriguing, intertwined stories. What holds it all together is the author’s voice—intelligent, sensitive, wry, and deeply honest. This isn’t a grand adventure and there are no tidy endings. It’s messy, complicated, conflicted—and deeply resonant ... These are complicated issues and Kaiser does an exceptional job of laying out not just the different perspectives, but his own conflicted feelings. Through it all, the background of Nazi evil and Polish anti-Semitism loom large. But there are no caricatures here, no easy simplifications. Instead Kaiser offers us a richly multilayered series of mysteries, all colored by the horror of the Holocaust and what it means to be a Jewish in the wake of such history ... This is a brilliant book, one that lays out several gripping mysteries and reveals how the personal is very much political, all wrapped in a compelling narrative that will keep readers turning the pages, hoping for a resolution that glimmers in the distance like a mirage.
The twists and turns are many and complex ... Family is what holds all of these threads together, and what makes Kaiser’s account so engaging is the skill with which he weaves everything together in multiple dimensions; even the title has many meanings. Consequently, this is much more than a legal case to assert ownership of an apartment building or a grandson continuing his grandfather’s quest. Tragedy, regret, loss, the desperate struggle for survival, and despair saturate this Holocaust story, but Kaiser renders them carefully, so as not to overwhelm his findings about myth and meaning in memory. This exceptional book will deeply engage readers interested in Jewish, Polish, and WWII history, especially the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the redemptive hunt for family treasures stolen by the Nazis.
Occasional family photographs are an added bonus ... 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.
... literate, constantly surprising ... 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.
