Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

It is remarkable how long an act of violence can echo.

Our origin stories, our stories of where we come from, of where our parents and their parents and their parents come from, are riddled with errors. My grandmother’s tombstone, to give a particularly blatant example—​it’s literally set in stone—​says she was born in Oświęcim, but that’s wrong, she grew up there but was born in Rzeszów. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about someone schlepping to eastern Europe in order to trace their family story, to follow their memory-map, only to discover that they’d had their entire lives a major or minor detail incorrect—​the dates don’t add up, the train routes are impossible, this address never existed, the ghetto had already been liquidated by then.

It always feels surprising, bumping up against an error like this, but it shouldn’t be. Family stories are poor preservers of history: they’re fragmented, badly documented, warped by hearsay, conjecture, legend—​of course errors are going to creep in. This seems somehow wrong, even blasphemous, at odds with the private sacredness we impute to our origin stories. But most stories in most families aren’t meant or relied on as preservation of hard information, they’re meant and relied on as preservation of soft information, of sentiment, narrative, identity, of who someone was and, subsequently, who you are. It tells not a historical truth but an emotional truth. I’d even argue that the built-in uncertainty—​often unknowability—​of details large and small is essential to the family mythos: we not only receive but also participate in the story; on some level we choose to believe. We ascribe.

And the truth is that the details most easily corrupted are not details most people care all that much about anyway. What’s the difference between number 12 and number 34 when either building is on a funny-named street in a city you think about only in terms of dead Jews in a country your family fled from? The mistake on my grandmother’s tombstone—​I’ve been bringing it up for years but no one really cares, we’re never going to change it, because the difference between Bubby having been born in Rzeszów and Bubby having been born in Oświęcim is, to us, her children and grandchildren who cannot properly pronounce or find on a map either city, negligible. And anyway the errors are almost never discovered. The stories sit undisturbed and unprovoked, congeal into lore, no one is any the wiser.

But what happens when the story is disturbed and provoked? When you seek to inspect or inhabit or engage with or build out parts of the story? Then the details do matter, especially the details you can touch and see and get up close to. Oświęcim and Rzeszów are more than two hundred kilometers apart. The difference between Małachowskiego 12 and Małachowskiego 34 is, when you’re asserting your rights as an heir, immense. Once you enter the story, the where and the what matter, because those are your access points; those are the story’s anchors, the myth-containers, and to get that wrong, to chase down the wrong building or go to the wrong city, is to get your story wrong, to misfire, to suffer that private but sharp humiliation of having cared in the wrong direction.

Or maybe even then it doesn’t matter, maybe the relationship between our stories and the places they describe is more tenuous? Maybe it’s just a phantom force, just us insisting there’s something, pretending there’s something, tricking ourselves into believing there’s something? Earlier I wrote how these sorts of stories can flex, can absorb, that they’ll always have interesting and meaningful detours, but maybe that’s not true, maybe the detours in fact break the story a little, put into relief and reinforce the distance between you and whatever or whoever it is you think you’re connecting with. Expose the fiction of sentimentalism, in other words. You thought this thing, this object, this building was meaningful, was special, but it turns out no, it’s just an object, just another building, it means nothing to you, you were creating all that in your head. And if that feeling of meaningfulness could be so wrong and misplaced, then what is that feeling worth? What is that feeling at all?

Or maybe the sentimental history isn’t erased but overwritten, maybe it retains the narrative of having been meaningful. In Jewish law, when an object that is kadosh, holy, loses its holiness—​like a Torah scroll that loses a couple of letters and thus becomes unusable—​it does not then become spiritually meaningless, does not revert to a mundane object; rather it becomes an object that once was holy, and must be treated accordingly: you cannot put it in the trash, you have to give it a proper burial.

An ignoble restart. Jason, Larysa, and I returned to Sosnowiec to see the new, by which I mean the correct, building.

Małachowskiego 34 was a three-story building on the corner. The exterior of the top two floors—​the residences—​was run-down, unlooked-after, a splotchy gray on grayer gray in the pattern of a skin disease. The ground floor, occupied by a pharmacy, had a fresh coat of beige paint and bright red awnings and signage. Later I would reread my grandfather’s application to the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and see (not for the first time but only now was I paying attention) that he’d cited the loss of a “Corner house / Apothecary on the ground floor.”

Relative to number 12—​a meaningless but unavoidable comparison—​number 34 was a little smaller (so less valuable?) but on the corner of a busy intersection (so more valuable?); it was a little stranger, a little more baroque, much less Communist. Jason asked me what I thought about the new building, if I liked it or if I was excited or something like that. I shrugged. I wasn’t feeling much at all toward number 34; it was a dry unsentimental encounter.

We got inside without a problem. The