Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Menachem Kaiser was raised in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish American-Canadian family. His grandfather, a holocaust survivor from Poland died before he was born. Kaiser is named for him. When, in the course of a routine visit to Poland, he has occasion to visit Sosnowiec, his grandfather’s hometown, he secures an address from his father of his grandfather’s apartment building. Kaiser reasons this will let him imagine his ancestors at a concrete location, their home. He learns his grandfather spent many post-war years trying to establish his family’s ownership of this building, with no success. This book is ostensibly about Kaiser’s decision to pursue his family’s claim to the property. The litigation to establish this is commenced by the “Killer” an attorney in her eighties. It proceeds in a desultory and seemingly absurd manner over a number of years. In the meantime, Kaiser becomes interested in learning about “Project Riese,” a massive Nazi effort to tunnel into and hollow out sections of the Owl Mountains for an uncertain purpose. It was built through the forced labor of Jews and others who were interned in nearby camps at various locations. The seven underground complexes were in various stages of construction when they were blown up by the Nazis near the end of the war. The ruins attract explorers, some seeking a reputed treasure load in a “golden train,” some proof of the Nazi’s successes with time travel, and some just seeking to find what is there, weapons, buttons, gold teeth... And in the course of touring the area with a well-regarded explorer, Kaiser overhears his last name mentioned by nearby Polish speakers who do not know his name. He learns that a man named Abraham Kaiser kept a diary, on paper from cement bags, at each of the eight forced labor camps where he was interned after an initial stay at Auschwitz. It was published in Poland in 1962. Abraham’s diary gives the explorers as much information as is available about where some of the internment camps were located, thus guiding them to the areas where the work was conducted. Kaiser pursues Abraham’s story, again seeking to make this man real to him. It seems he ultimately makes himself more real. This lyrical memoir was a pleasure to read. It is touched with humor, as there are so many missteps that arise when one is seeking concrete information about a family and community that was erased. The explorers and other people who contribute to his quest, both living and dead are wonderfully drawn: Their generosity, their faults, their points of view, heroism, conspiracy theories, and an unexpected love make for a wonderful story. Kaiser reminds us that, if we are willing to process our experiences, our deepest understanding of the past can yield and reshape itself and that this journey is as important as the facts we uncover.

Menachem Kaiser’s irreverent and poignant (isn’t that a pair of adjectives?) memoir begins with the death of his grandfather, a man he never knew but whose name he shares and whose Holocaust story sent the latter Menachem on a meandering journey through the Polish landscape and legal system in an attempt to understand more and to reclaim a property that belonged to his family nearly a century earlier.

Kaiser travels to Sosnowiec, a small town in the region of Silesia, which borders the Czech Republic and is home to countless ethnic populations and a rich history of demographic confusion and love of mystery. In this strange community, Kaiser becomes acquainted with a group of “treasure hunters” whose fascination with Nazi-era memorabilia and artifacts is both admirable and entirely disconcerting, and he discovers a familial tie to these explorers that turns him into something of niche celebrity.

As he follows the paper trail left by his grandfather and other relatives, Kaiser makes mistakes and missteps that are frustrating, embarrassing, and exhausting, but he infuses his storytelling with a sense of reflection and humor that emphasized the random significance of family and place. I was impressed by Kaiser’s ability to tease out details of a single moment and mine them for a cohesive story while acknowledging how much was unknown and unknowable.

However, I thought the book needed some cleaning up around its transitions. More than once, I had to stop to figure out what we were talking about and how we got there, particularly in the sections about conspiracy theories and drinking in the woods. Certainly, these stories and characters added life and energy and depth to Kaiser’s efforts to navigate property law and legal jargon—in Polish—but it felt disappointingly disjointed and, at times, overly simplified.

As Kaiser himself acknowledges towards the end of the book, Holocaust memoirs, biographies, and histories are plentiful, which can have the effect of diluting the undeniable power of each individual story. Both parts of this statement are true, but they hardly apply to this book; Kaiser writes around explicit tragedy and devastation to write a Holocaust story unlike any I’ve read before.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and author Menacham Kaiser. Opinions stated in this review are honest and my own.
Release Date: 16 March 2021

Plunder


You knew from the beginning! The young boy going to the cemetery to say Kaddish for his late grandfather, a man he never met. With his observant father. A foundation that took Menachem Kaiser on his journey back to Poland.

With twists and turns the author weaves an intriguing tale. Menacham Kaiser spent his years looking for he property belonged to that late grandfather. And along the way learned so much more!
Locating the apartment was the quest, but as he met others he became entwined the the treasure seekers and their revered artifacts and the book on hidden treasures written by his great uncle about those treasures. Nazi’s, the
Holocaust play a large part in this book that could just as easily been a novel!


Marilyn kranich

Sent from my iPhone

Menachem Kaiser never knew his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who tried unsuccessfully to regain his lost property: an apartment building in Poland. Years later, Kaiser takes up the quest anew. But along the way, he realizes that his reclamation effort is about much more than just an apartment building - it's about memory, suffering, history, and the legacy of the family members who came before.

I've never read another book like this one - Kaiser writes eloquently about his dealings with the Polish government, as well as a merry band of Silesian treasure hunters. I could feel his sorrow and frustration as he tried to assemble a picture of the past and reclaim the property that was rightfully his. My one problem with the book is that it got a little repetitive in the last section - there's only so many times you can discuss Polish court happenings and keep a reader's interest. But this is a chronicle of a true historical and legal odyssey, and I am grateful to have learned about Kaiser's family history. 3.5 stars rounded up.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[[Plunder by Menachem Kaiser]]

Menachem Kaiser is a young Jewish man whose family, as part of the Holocaust, was forcibly moved from their home in Poland. Kaiser lives in the USA and carefully begins to describe a process of reclaiming his family's physical property, which some call *former* property.

> [...] for twenty years my grandfather had tried to reclaim or at least be compensated for his family’s property, and for twenty years he’d gotten nowhere.

Kaiser is able to describe a delicate ethical journey throughout this book: how do you pursue a seventy-year-old claim on a building in a town that you've never set foot in, a building in which strangers now live?

A few paragraphs put this in perspective:

> It would come up in conversation that I was reclaiming my great-grandfather’s property in Poland. Most people were into it. They thought it was an interesting and meaningful thing I was doing. Particularly enthusiastic were those with parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who’d fled eastern Europe, or really anywhere, or those who were themselves refugees — in other words, those who had in their family a narrative of flight. These people tended to see the reclamation as a kind of crusade, they believed I was righting a wrong, taking up the cause of my survivor grandfather, exacting a tiny but nonetheless significant act of Holocaust justice.
>
> But not everyone was into it. I encountered plenty of ambivalence, skepticism, criticism. This was especially the case in Poland, where the cost and consequences of the war are so much more immediate, the narratives so much messier. Friends and friends of friends, Jews and non-Jews, locals and expats raised their eyebrows and wondered, more or less accusingly, more or less confrontationally, if what I was doing in Sosnowiec was in fact, beneath the sentimental surface, beneath this lovely little story of taking up my dead survivor grandfather’s cause, an act of appropriation, or something like appropriation, or even if it wasn’t really appropriation it nonetheless smelled like appropriation, it had the same ugly goal and result. People live in this building? they asked. I said, Yes, it’s an apartment building, people live there. Okay, they said, so correct me if I’m wrong but at the end of the day you’re taking away their homes?
>
> You have nothing to do with this building. You never even knew about this building until a few years ago. And now you’re coming out of nowhere to claim it.
>
> Maybe the root of our misunderstanding is semantic. Let’s use a different terminology — let’s drop “reclaiming.” “Reclaiming” implies a transfer of ownership, a seizure, and I can understand how that might make some people uneasy. So let’s drop “reclaiming” and instead use “asserting.” So not “reclaiming the building” but “asserting ownership of the building.”

The above is deeply understood and argumented elegantly by Kaiser. He also asserts his family's right to the building as they were murdered by the Nazis, not without its internal problems; Jews in Poland experienced problems with non-jews in Poland. Add to this the paranoid experience that Nazism brings (for example, how the Nazis loved how reporting on each other brought benefits and fear on every level), and things are made even more complex.

We follow Kaiser's journey into a country where his family were murdered and followed, through actually knocking on doors of houses where he believed the building was - only to discover he's been mistaken, but not before having some very uncomfortable discussions with the current residents.

> Whence the confusion? The addresses had shifted. When this block of apartment buildings, Małachowskiego 10–18, was constructed, the numbers on the buildings farther down the street were bumped up in order to make room. Małachowskiego 12 became Małachowskiego 34.

There's also pan-Atlantic and legal proceedings to take into account: Kaiser hires a lawyer who's called The Killer, who handles his court case in Poland, where most people who make ownership claims have to leap through hoops and fire to make it somewhere, legally speaking, without their case being dismissed.

It's interesting to read of Kaiser's travels in Poland. He even meets up with people who blend WW2 paraphernalia and love for UFOs:

> We went inside and sat down at a large oak table in a wood-paneled room. The sanctuary had a clubhouse kind of feel. On the wall were framed maps, a large metal ornamental Reichsadler, a spoked steering wheel of a ship. An antique typewriter was on display in the corner. Lots of very fine woodwork. The table’s centerpiece was a three-foot model of the Eiffel Tower. Next to it was a heap of explorer-related documents — maps, permits, applications, sketches of Nazi UFOs.

He also meets a WW2 survivor:

> Spiranski said that he liked Jews a lot. His father had rented their home from a Jew named Mortke, and had worked in a beverage company for a Jew named Rensky. Mortke was a very good person, Spiranski said, then began to weep. All the Jewish people and all the Polish people remember Mortke. I don’t know what happened to him. As far as I know, all the Jews were gathered by the Germans, and probably killed.

The stories about the people he meet are both interesting on a personal and moral level. Here's a telling paragraph:

> I remembered how startled and confused I had been by the Nazi paraphernalia in Andrzej’s Land Rover. Even if a Reichsadler dangling from your rearview mirror doesn’t necessarily mean you identify as a Nazi, surely you must be aware that some people might in fact make that assumption, right? The fact that Andrzej apparently did not care, that he had no problem flaunting his swastikas, was worrisome. Where I come from you do your absolute best to put to bed even the slightest suspicion that you are into the Third Reich.

I won't detail the interesting and frustrating details in the legal aspects of Kaiser's claims, but it's safe to say the Polish court made it extremely difficult for him to try and pursue any results. One simple example of this is how he tried to define what he'd done to ascertain his family had been murdered in the Holocaust: upon presenting the databases he'd fruitlessly searched to see whether he could find any traces of his family, he's then asked by the court to present a list of the databases he *hadn't* searched (or his case would risk being dismissed).

Also:

> The judge in Sosnowiec, Judge Grabowska, had considered only whether or not my relatives could be “declared dead,” and ruled they could not, because the conditions were not met. When did they die? Where did they die? How did they die? It was all blank. There were no eyewitnesses; they didn’t show up on any concentration camp lists; their location during the war was unknown. Judge Grabowska had not malevolently twisted the law; she’d offered a technical argument regarding a technical requirement. (A perhaps troubling corollary is that Poland/1939–1945/Holocaust is too abstract/loose to qualify as place/time/method of death, which on the one hand, sure, that is abstract and loose, but on the other hand, one might contend that the Holocaust should be considered at least as “deadly” and “specific” as a natural disaster.)

All in all, this book is both a work of introspection, morals, ethics, and legal matters, yet I feel Kaiser never veers off from the human aspects of it all: he seems to care about the people who are currently living in the building that he claims legal ownership of, and doesn't want to evict them. There is also the deeply unsettling aspects of how Jews who try to assert ownership of physical objects - e.g. buildings and art - are basically dismissed, much like troublesome flies.

Through his journeys, Kaiser puts his thumb on how Jews have been persecuted and still are; He does this while skillfully navigating personal stories, looking through old family films, visiting cultures and different peoples in Poland, and trying to understand the Polish legal system, which changes during his court case.

All in all, this is a very interesting book that reads simply and poses a few very interesting questions to the reader: what would *you* do in Kaiser's shoes?

At one point during what the author calls his memory-quest, Menachem Kaiser is told by a Polish man during an informal interview that “one cannot replant old trees.” That phrase hit me hard as the most succinct and poignant way to talk about the central problem in Plunder. Kaiser is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. His grandfather never talked about those years much. All Kaiser and the rest of his family (all born after the war) knew was that their grandfather lost almost his entire family and that he had been trying for decades to recover an apartment building that had been lost or stolen during the war. This building, on Małachowskiego in Sosnowiec, provides the excuse for Kaiser to do what so many descendants of Holocaust survivors do: return to the alte heim (old country) to find out what traces their families and the war have left on the world.

Plunder is a meandering, often funny book. Kaiser has a great eye for the absurd and his commentary is frequently hilarious. Those moments of levity—especially among Polish treasure hunters seeking lost valuables from World War II—balance out Kaiser’s deeper thoughts about what it means to look for family history in the wake of the Holocaust, to try to reclaim lost property, and whether or not all of this can help him understand his grandfather better. During his memory-quest, Kaiser talks to an 80-year-old Polish lawyer called The Killer who specializes in helping the descendants of Holocaust survivors, other descendants looking for lost history, tangling with the Kafkaesque Polish judicial system, and a lot of people who are fascinated with secrets still hidden in Poland.

Kaiser’s musing fascinated me because, although Kaiser never says it, I have to wonder what (if anything) would be just reparations for the loss of the world of European Jews. When I read the dialogue about replanting an old tree, it struck me that the Holocaust split history. If it had never happened, the Kaiser family would never have had to leave Poland or change the spelling of their name from Kajzer. So many lives would’ve been able to continue and who knows what our world would be like now? But the Holocaust did happen, the spaces where so many people would’ve lived, others moved in and had their own lives for decades. If the Kaiser’s reclaim the building on Małachowskiego, it would be a hollow victory. It could uproot a lot of people and it wouldn’t bring anyone back.

Plunder is one of the best books I’ve read by a descendant of a Holocaust survivor because it tackles so many unanswerable questions about the Holocaust and its aftermath. I was left with an aching sense of how much is still known. Most of what Kaiser has to work with are things that were remembered (and occasionally misremembered) by his family members. What documents he’s able to find are in Polish or Yiddish, which require translation. Almost everyone he talked to has to be translated, too. Even when Kaiser learns definitive facts about his family, he knows that it doesn’t fill in much of the mystery. Yet, this immense absence doesn’t seem to depress Kaiser that much. In the end, Kaiser argues that his seeking—and the searching of other descendants and the treasure hunters—keep the names and memories of the dead from being lost forever.

''Plunder'' is a story about memory and reclaiming a forgotten or lost part of one's own history. I really enjoyed the setting of the novel.

Although I was intrigued by the premise of this book, the writing and tone was not what I was expecting. I imagined more of a curious attitude with some pace to the writing. However, this is a much more introspective book that lingers on family history and is very personal for the author.

This book was a big surprise for me, but not a disappointment. Basing on the publisher's description, I was expecting a fun adventure story. You can find traces of it, but the book is mostly a blend of very personal memoir and essays on the nature of human memory, heritage, Shoah, conspiracy theories, and many more topics.

It is exceptionally well written and insightful, although I have to admit that sometimes the author should listen to himself and "stop being cranky" about some stuff - he can be extremely touchy. I also had sometimes felt uneasy about his attitude towards some of the people he met. Nonetheless, it was a very interesting read.

Thanks to the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.

Menachen Kaiser never met his paternal grandfather, who passed away before Menachem was born. Yet, every year, on the "yarzheit", or anniversary, of his grandfather's death, Menachem and his father would visit the cemetery to say Kaddish / prayers in his grandfather's honour. Menachem, (and for that matter, Menachem's father), did not know much about his grandfather's life in Poland. He had rarely spoke about it. As an adult, on a trip to Poland, Menachem reminds himself of (the one thing he remembers hearing about his grandfather), that is, his grandfather's failed attempts to reclaim property that their family owned before the war. With the address of the property in hand, Menachem goes to Sosnowiec to acquaint himself with the city (and "home") of his paternal grandfather. #Plunder is Menachem Kaiser's detailed account of his attempt to settle his grandfather's claim. for this property.


Ultimately, the need to find out whether Menachem finally succeeds in receiving "reparations" for what his grandfather claimed rightfully belonged to the Kaiser family before the war, is what kept me reading this book right to the end. I will not ruin the book by saying what happens. But it was an extremely interesting read, and it brings to the forefront the complications (and ethical dilemmas) of what belongs to you, after you leave, after a war, and, so many years later....

Besides Menachem's personal search, on his quest he is introduced to a population of Nazi treasure hunters, that most people know little about. In Silesia, Hitler had (mostly Jewish) labourers dig out miles and miles of underground tunnels, where it is believed a train full of gold, as well as many other treasures were hidden. The search for these treasures is real, and highly regulated by the Polish government. The crazy part of this is that these treasure seekers do not connect their desire to acquire Nazi loot, with the evil at the root of the Nazis.

This is a very interesting read, Thank you #netgalley for this e-ARC of #plunder, in return for my review.

I have always wondered what it must have been like for people to return from the camps and find their homes were taken. I have also wondered how the people in those homes felt - perhaps not all of them knew those homes were stolen. This is an I trusting book which offers insights into the rights and wrongs of inheritance and how damage can be perpetuated over generations. Beautifully written, the author tells a story with skill and sensitivity.