Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

was trying to do with this building seemed to me to be at worst innocuous. But why not righteous, why not good, why not meaningful, significant, sentimental?

A few months later, back in Poland, I interviewed a treasure hunter, Grzegorz, whose grandfather was Jewish and had been in the same concentration camps as Abraham. Grzegorz didn’t see himself as Jewish, but was proud of his legacy, felt a responsibility toward his past. And he saw in me a kindred spirit. The first thing he said to me, as soon as I turned on my recorder, was “I am the same as you. Just like you follow your grandfather, I follow my grandfather.” My instinct was to correct him, to tell him that Abraham wasn’t actually my grandfather, he was my grandfather’s cousin, but I held off, in the moment it didn’t seem to matter. We were quiet for a long time; Grzegorz seemed to be contemplating what his grandfather had been through, and my thoughts turned to my grandfather, not Abraham, but my real grandfather, my father’s father, who was also a survivor, who’d also been in the camps, but whose story has been lost, and I wondered what it would mean to “follow” my grandfather, I wondered if what I was doing with the reclamation constituted “following.” And then I thought about what my father had said to me that night in the dining room, when he’d challenged me on my newfound family obsession, and I, sitting across from Grzegorz as he fought back tears, understood what my father had meant, what he’d tried to say.

It pained my father that I’d strayed from the path that’d been marked out for me when I was born, which was the path marked out for him, by his father, when he was born; he saw in my life decisions a rejection of the patrimony. And so this was what was behind his question about my newfound family obsession: All of a sudden out of nowhere I was reclaiming that patrimony? Had the chutzpah to redefine that patrimony? To insist I represented my grandfather and his wishes? That I was now so dedicated to his legacy? It was inconsistent, even hypocritical, in my father’s eyes, to slice my grandfather’s character like that, to pick and choose, to find meaning only where I wanted to find meaning, to uphold one kind of inheritance at the expense of another, more important kind. The reclamation was an assertion of a relationship with my grandfather, and of a relationship of a particular sort, and the fact of the matter is—​so my father was saying—​that this was not the sort of relationship my grandfather would have cared about, or at least not the kind he would have prioritized. I was saying to my grandfather, The building! You and I share this! And my grandfather was—​via my father, the rightful or at least most qualified spokesman—​responding, The building? Who cares about the building? That’s not what I want us to share, that’s not what I wanted you to inherit.

The most familiar form of non-material inheritance is sentimentalism. Wherein the object itself is less relevant than its spiritual load. We use the term “priceless” because we’re talking an entirely different currency. It’s a memory-value, which is a spiritual value. Or, if you will, a personal holiness. And that holiness can be passed down, can be cherished and re-cherished, even if along the way the holiness gets torqued a little: your grandfather cherished this watch and now you too cherish this watch but really you cherish your grandfather’s cherishing. I think about sentimental objects not as a way to connect with those who are gone, but as a way to describe them. To ascribe verbs to them. Characterization. To bring them out of the universal and into the specific.

And though my family is astonishingly unsentimental—​objects are objects are objects: never mementoes, keepsakes, or heirlooms—​we are in fact exceedingly well practiced in let’s call it the imposition of spiritual significance. Our ritual objects are sacred objects. Tefillin, shofar, esrog, kipah, Torah. These items are kadosh, are holy. But if the sentimental is a personal, or interpersonal, holiness, the kadosh is God-driven holiness. Tefillin are holy are holy are holy. They are no holier to me than to anyone else; the holiness exists independently of any individual.

Only when it comes to ritual does the holiness get particular: for all the thousands of rules in this religion, there are a million ways of performing them. It’s halacha, the laws, versus minhag, the accretion of a family’s quirks in how they fulfill those laws. After eating meat my family, as is tradition, waits before eating dairy. But we wait not six hours, as is standard, but into the sixth: five hours and one minute. There is no reason for this; it’s simply our minhag. It’s what we do. Or how I don’t wear the little plastic cover on the tefillin shel yad, the box I wrap around my arm. This practice makes no sense. The cover has no religious function, it’s just there to protect the tefillin’s fragile corners from being blunted. But it’s what we do. Minhag pushes beyond the irrational—​which is a crucial ingredient for holiness—​and into the anti-rational, which is a crucial ingredient for art, for love, and for tradition.

Minhag is spiritual lineage: families passing on, holding on to, protecting their particular religious identity, their spiritual personalities. And the war was a massive rupture of this lineage, and it’s a rupture that rarely gets discussed, because you don’t notice when it’s gone, because the practice just reverts to the mean, you don’t know what your grandfather did so you just do what everyone else does. It’s a rupture that’s neither institutional, historical, religious, nor communal in nature, but familial. These rules aren’t written down anywhere; they’re passed down via a kind of osmosis; it’s a family’s private Torah. And all these Torahs were lost. No one had parents, and then no one