Menachem Kaiser was named after a grandfather he never knew, a man who was more of an abstraction than reality. Few family stories were told about Maier Menachem Kajzer (Zaidy), who survived the Holocaust but died eight years before his namesake was born. “My grandfather’s absence is a dry and untragic fact,” Kaiser writes in “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure,” published March 16 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The memoir chronicles Kaiser’s unexpected adventures with Polish treasure hunters and even conspiracy theorists while he relitigated the claim to the family property that his Zaidy had fought for more than twenty years and lost.
It was only after Kaiser learned of his Zaidy’s arduous, fruitless effort to reclaim that building that he began to feel — longed to feel — an emotional connection with his grandfather. He was moved when he read Zaidy’s letters to attorneys and his pleas for restitution on government forms. “I could imagine my grandfather’s desperation, his disappointment,” Kaiser writes. “How could he not connect the relatively minor injustice of being unable to secure his inheritance with the unspeakable tragedy that had left him as the only heir?”
The Kaiser family property was a modest apartment structure in Sosnowiec, Poland, purchased in 1936 by Menachem’s great-grandfather, Moshe Kajzer, and Moshe’s brother, Shia. Moshe, Shia, their wives and most of their children were murdered by the Nazis. By Polish law the building should have passed to Kajzer’s surviving heirs — in this case, Moshe’s son, Maier Menachem.
Kaiser’s status as the grandchild of survivors was a basic fact of life that he shared with many cousins and friends in Toronto. He did not feel haunted as so many children and grandchildren of survivors do. Yet, in taking up Zaidy’s legal battle, he saw an opportunity “to allow myself to be disturbed. The building, maybe, was a means to access a history, a person, that I’d always thought inaccessible, immutably closed.” Later, Kaiser underscores this feeling, writing that he was “longing for longing: I want to be able to mourn.”
Kaiser traveled to Poland, bringing along a photographer friend, and he hired a translator as well as an attorney (a woman whose nickname is “The Killer”) to represent him and his family. When he arrived, Kaiser was skittish about speaking to tenants living in the building’s apartments. Although he was eager to learn as much of the history of the place as he could and to see if he could find anyone who might have known his grandfather, he also realized that these tenants, while benefiting from the theft of Jewish property, were not responsible for the injustice and may not have any idea that their home fell into that category. Fortunately, one tenant happened to be the daughter of a former city planner, and she gladly shared many official city maps dating back decades.
While studying his family records, Kaiser also made a remarkable discovery: His Zaidy’s first cousin was Abraham Kajzer, a well-known survivor of eight slave labor camps who published one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs. Kajzer is a celebrated hero among many Polish “treasure hunters” — who mine for booty in the hidden places where Nazis stored their loot — because he wrote very specifically about many of these locations in his memoir. Menachem Kaiser became a kind of celebrity over his family connection, and he was invited by these explorers to join in on several of their hunts.
“Plunder” is not a tightly woven memoir. Kaiser writes extensively about the treasure hunters and Abraham Kajzer. He shares much of Kajzer’s life story and his miraculous survival, as well as excerpts from his memoir. These stories, while independently compelling, create a disjointed feel. With his own grandfather remaining largely unknown, Kaiser seems to transfer the need for connection to his renowned cousin, who left giant footprints for him to follow.
Kaiser seems to transfer the need for connection with his grandfather to his renowned cousin.
By the end of the memoir, Kaiser’s legal restitution case remains unresolved. He and his lawyer end up “screaming into a bureaucratic void,” stymied by an implacable, anti-Semitic Polish judge. Understandably, Kaiser grows resentful and cynical.
In a book about heritage and legacy, Kaiser writes surprisingly little about his relationship to faith. This feels like a missing link that might have woven these disparate elements together. Kaiser’s father once challenged him on his obsession with the building, saying, “This is not what he (Zaidy) would have cared about.” The author admits, “It pained my father that I’d strayed from the path that’d been marked out for me when I was born, which was the path marked out for him, by his father, when he was born; he saw in my life decisions a rejection of the patrimony.”
Kaiser acknowledges that his endeavor is “less about the building than what the building stands for, and in turn what the reclamation stands for… What matters here is less the name on a deed than trying and failing but trying still to understand what it means to have, to lose, to take, to take back, to intrude, to inherit, to define your legacy…” Despite its weaknesses, “Plunder” is a compelling memoir from a gifted author.
Judy Gruen is a writer and editor. Her books include “The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith.”
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