Plunder

A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure

BookHardcover

EUR27,00

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A New York Times Critics' Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for BiographyFrom a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family's apartment building in Poland-and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows 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 laborer 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.

Details

ISBN/GTIN978-1-328-50803-4

Product TypeBook

BindingHardcover

FormatSewn

PublisherHarperCollins

Publishing date16/03/2021

LanguageEnglish

SizeWidth 156 mm, Height 236 mm, Thickness 32 mm

Weight470 g

Article no.18091575

CatalogsLibri

Data source no.A40061197

Product groupBU556

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There are a lot of books out there about people tracing their family's history of loss through the Holocaust. So many sometimes that trying to pick the really interesting ones out can become quite bewildering. Indeed even the idea of working out which stories are "more interesting" or "worthy" seems almost inhumane. Menachem Kaiser's 'Plunder' is one where there needs to be no debate. It tells the story of his attempt to get back a building in a small-ish Polish town which had once belonged to his family. Along the way, he is introduced to a group of 'treasure hunters' - people who desperately seek Nazi treasure in remote parts of the Polish landscape in order to solve decades long (often likely non-existent) puzzles.
What made Kaiser's book so interesting to me was his self-questioning narrative. He constantly analyses what both he and the treasure hunters are doing and does not seek easy moral answers, which makes for a profound reflection on the notion of ownership and loss.

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It is quite unusual for professional, academic historians to know their subjects personally. More unusual still for them if these subjects were members of regimes which the historians look at critically. And perhaps more unusual again if the historian in question suspects the subject to have been at the centre of an enormous crime. Such is however the reality of the relationship between Jonathan Petropoulos and Bruno Lohse, "Göring's Man in Paris".

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Mildred Harnack was a central figure in the resistance to the Nazi regime in Berlin. An American academic, it was her husband who brought her to Berlin at the end of the 1920s. Both she and he came from the political left and once the Nazis were in power, they almost immediately sought to build networks of resistance - Mildred's began with the students she taught. As the Third Reich went on, their networks merged with others in Berlin and they also began to pass on information to foreign intelligence services - the act which would eventually cost them their lives.
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Simon May takes a highly unusual and orginal look at his Jewish-German identity in this fine book. A philosopher by trade, he delves deep into his family's history in order to uncover the story of his lost German and Jewish identities. The book largely focuses on the history of May's mother and her sisters, all of whom survived the Holocaust in a quite extraordinary variety of ways. This is therefore on one hand a gripping account of a family's survival but on another an exploration of identity, national, cultural and religious, by a philosopher who is prepared to ask himself difficult questions in order to develop a profound sense of what his relationship to his own Germaness and Jewishness means.

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Author

Kaiser, Menachem

MENACHEM KAISER holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, New York, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Subjects

Libri

Biography / Autobiography