Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure was a book title that certainly grabbed my attention when I saw it reviewed in the Times in March, and a positive review it was. Menachem Kaiser has written a story with twists and turns and at least three different plot lines. He tells the story of his grandfather, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis as they were arriving in his small town and ended up building a new life in Canada. Born 6 years after his death, Menachem never knew his grandfather and learned only as an adult that his grandfather had owned an apartment house in Poland and that his father and sibs had been trying unsuccessfully to reclaim it. Kaiser, who had spent time in eastern Europe on a Fulbright, took up the the quest. And so began the first part of this story. Kaiser was referred to an 87 year old Polish woman lawyer in Warsaw, known as the Killer, who specializes in reclaiming stolen Jewish property and was introduced to the opaque Polish legal system. As an indication of the challenges he faced, the lawyer was required to prove that the grandfather was actually dead (he would have been 140 years old at the time) and that none of his siblings were alive either. No documents! No success. This part of the story is still unresolved after 5 years.

Another plot line involved  Kaiser’s discovery of his grandfather’s first cousin Abraham who did not flee, went with his wife and child to Auschwitz where they were murdered, and who had worked on an huge underground tunnel system called the Reise dug into a mountain by the Nazi prisoners in Poland. The Reise was rumored to be the hiding place for plundered Jewish treasures.  Abraham escaped the camp just as the Russians were entering Poland and was hidden by a Polish widow in her cellar until the Nazis retreated. He wrote a memoir after the war that included details about the project,  and this has been the ur-text for treasure hunters who continue to look for the lost gold. Menachem obtained a copy of his memoir, and so another totally separate story unfolded, a story of Jewish life in pre-war Poland, concentration camp brutality, and a bitter-sweet romance between Abraham and his rescuer. They ended up separating after 3 years and he emigrated to Israel. She was ultimately honored as a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for her heroics.

And finally….there is a short coda in which Menachem meets a group of American Jews on a Roots tour in Poland. A man on the tour had a map drawn by his Polish grandfather showing where he hid his gold in the walls of his attic before he fled, and the man had come to find and reclaim it. Menachem into the quest! They did get to the attic, but did they find the gold? Menachem never tells, and the story ends.

Our book club had mixed reviews. This is Kaiser’s first book. Several of us thought the writing was rambling and flat. He tried to deal with several significant moral issues. Was he looking for revenge or retribution or for financial reward? What about the people currently living in the apartments who had nothing to do with the Holocaust? Were they to be displaced? How do these issues related to our own country’s wrestling with reparations for descendants of enslaved Blacks? His discussions were not particularly revealing or insightful. Would I recommend it? It was a good pandemic read, not a great read, but short.

Bernie Aserkoff