Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

I never met my grandfather; I am not deeply affected. I am not numb—​at a gravesite you feel something: you feel the shape of sadness, you feel an empathetic stab that others feel the loss so viscerally—​but my grandfather is nearly as abstract to me as is his grandfather, whose name not even my father knows. My grandfather’s absence is a dry and untragic fact. That I bear his name is a circumstance of timing: had either of my two elder sisters been male, he would have been named Meir Menachem, which had been hanging there for eight years, waiting for a boy to fall onto.

When my father finally finishes the Psalms, he and I each take a rock from the ground and put it on top of the tombstone, a custom whose origins I don’t know but which I take to mean: I was here, I remember. As we drive through and then out of the cemetery, my father—​feeling raw, or plaintive, or perhaps lonely—​talks about his father. But he doesn’t say much, and his descriptions almost never go beyond frustratingly loose generalities; there are almost never any anecdotes, quotes, conflicts, setbacks, victories, habits, quirks, nothing that could give shape or form to the dead man we just visited. One year my father told me that my grandfather was a health fanatic. “He did yoga,” my father said, “way before it was trendy. He stood on his head every day.” One year he told me that my grandfather suffered from ulcers and drank Milk of Magnesia. Another year he told me that my grandfather and I were very similar. I asked my father to elaborate—​how exactly am I like Zaidy? My father shook his head and said, “I don’t know, I just can see it.”

There are photographs of my grandfather, but not many, and most of them are rigidly composed and uncandid. He is handsome, bald, and he looks good in a suit. He has a wide, clean-shaven face and cheeks that ball up when he smiles.

We knew that my grandfather was the only one in his family to have survived the war, that his parents and his siblings had been murdered, as was nearly all of his large extended family. But as knowledge this was dark matter. We knew nothing about his prewar or intrawar life. We didn’t know which concentration camps he had been in or what his father had done for a living. We knew nothing about his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins; my father and his two siblings—​let alone my generation—​would be hard-pressed to tell you the names of my grandfather’s siblings; they wouldn’t even be entirely sure of the number. We knew they had died, but we had no idea who they were. We did not know where they died, or how they died. And so when my grandfather died, they died another sort of death.

I went to Poland for the first time in 2010, for reasons that had nothing to do with family history—​I’d just finished a research fellowship in Lithuania and was spending Rosh Hashanah in Kraków—​but once I was there I felt I should go to my grandparents’ hometowns. It seemed like something I should do. Less an obligation, really, than etiquette. When you’re in town you visit your relatives and say hi; when you’re in Toronto on your grandfather’s yahrtzeit you go to his grave and say Psalms; when you’re in Poland for the first time you make the trip to your grandparents’ hometowns and take pictures. You go and for the rest of your life you can say you have been there.

I called my father and asked him what city his parents were from. He wasn’t entirely sure about his mother (“Oświęcim, but maybe Rzse-zów . . . ?”) but his father, he said, was definitely from Sosnowiec, a large city in the Silesian voivodeship, historically notable as the point where the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian empires kissed. I checked online and saw that it was only seventy kilometers from Kraków; I could make it there and back in a day, easy. I told my father I was going to go. He said he thought that was a nice idea.

My father had never been to Sosnowiec, and evidently held no burning desire to go; he’d been to Poland a couple of times, on air-conditioned tours of cities, shtetls, camps, and famous rabbis’ gravesites, and while I don’t think he was actively avoiding his father’s hometown—​had the guide offered to stop there, my father would have gladly agreed—​he had never felt compelled to make arrangements on his own. Overall my father seemed detached: Sosnowiec was where his father was born, where he went through what he went through, it is what it is. Partly this is due to personality: my father isn’t a sentimental man, doesn’t get attached to objects and places. But it’s also clear that my father’s ambivalence toward Sosnowiec has been to some degree determined by his father’s reticence: our arrangements of meaning, of intrinsic and extrinsic significances, are at least partly inherited. Had my grandfather talked often about his childhood, had he described his home and his school and his block and the ghetto in great and loving and terrifying detail, a sort of nostalgia—​untethered, derived, but still real—​would have been cemented in his children. They would have dreamt of Sosnowiec. So to ask what Sosnowiec meant to my father is really to ask what Sosnowiec meant to my grandfather. This is a much harder question.

I asked my father if he had any relevant addresses, and he said he thought so, he’d have to dig through some papers. A few hours later he called me back and spelled out Małachowskiego 12—​where, he said, he was pretty sure his father had grown up. My father also said that my great-grandfather had in fact owned this building; and that after the war my grandfather had tried and failed to reclaim it; and