A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography
From 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.
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“Ably read by author…Kaiser describes his mission in detail and brings out the personalities of the people he meets, doing so at a reasonable pace and with an intensity…Kaiser discusses many of the questions that inevitably arise during such endeavors, particularly as survivors dwindle in number and memories fade.”
— AudioFile
“A twisting and reverberant and consistently enthralling story.”
— New York Times“A morally complicated tale leavened by the author’s empathy and humor.”
— New York Times Book Review“An exemplary contribution to the recent literature on the fraught history of the Shoah.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Spellbinding…Superbly written, this page-turner reads like a gripping adventure novel.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“A master storyteller embarks on a journey…The odyssey is fascinating and thought-provoking.”
— Christian Science Monitor“His narrative is wonderfully digressive, laced with coincidences and ambiguities, and filled with just enough revelations to keep readers contentedly turning pages."
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Menachem Kaiser holds an MFA degree 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.