Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland.
Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland.
Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as 'The Killer'. A surprise discovery - that his grandfather's cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave labourer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex - leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder.
Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance - material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.
'Menachem Kaiser is a young writer and storyteller of stunning talent, originality, and wisdom, and his debut book is gloriously impossible to categorise - by turns hilarious and profound, digressive and suspenseful, intimate and sweeping, it stands as an enviable accomplishment.' -Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction- pilgrimage for the restless and hopeful
'Reparations and treasure hunting- I can't think of two better metaphors for memoir writing, and I can't think of a better recent memoir than Menachem Kaiser's Plunder, which has heart, humour, and intelligence to spare.' -Joshua Cohen, author of Attention- dispatches from a land of distraction
'A saga of family history and inheritance that reads like a murder mystery, Plunder begins with Menachem Kaiser's journey to reclaim a Polish apartment building but immediately becomes something far richer and stranger. Probing with unusual insight and humour into questions of memory, loss, and what we owe to the past, this impossible-to-put-down book - part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation on all that history hides from us - marks the debut of a major writer.' -Ruth Franklin, author of NBCC Award-winning Shirley Jackson- a rather haunted life
